eBay sellers are hawking used phones with TikTok preinstalled for thousands of dollars

With second hand phone tiktok Installed ones are being listed on eBay for thousands of dollars. And it appears that some people might actually buy them.

Although US President Donald Trump has signed one Executive order on Monday Delaying a potential ban on the social media app for 75 days, TikTok remains absent from all US app stores — Apple and Google have given no indication whether it will return. That means if you’re in the US and delete the app or lose your phone, you’re currently locked out, and there’s no way to download it. For content creators, brand marketers and social media managers, this can spell disaster. And an expensive one at that.

Opportunistic eBayers have taken the opportunity to cash in on this misfortune. A quick search for “TikTok phone” brings up over 9,000 listings in use Smartphone From the likes of Apple and Samsung, all TikTok apps come pre-installed.

This is possible by having the seller sign out of the iCloud or Google account associated with the device instead of restoring the phone to factory settings. Any buyer should be careful not to sync with their existing cloud backups, to avoid losing the app they paid so much for, as well as make sure any security measures are removed by the vendor.

It goes without saying that anyone considering this route should buy with extreme caution, especially given the asking prices many sellers are trying to charge.

You can list as many phones as you can with TikTok $50,000 Under eBay’s Buy It Now selling format, but it’s hard to believe anyone really thought their phone would sell for that—and there’s no sign that they have.

There are many more listed in the $2,000 to $5,000 range, but whether anyone is actually buying them at this price, it still seems unlikely.

What can be said, despite the inflated prices, there is Interest these phones is Sales, but exactly how much is difficult to confirm. Select the “sold” filter on eBay’s search and there are plenty of sales that appear to be completed, but almost all have an undisclosed “best offer accepted” note attached.

Their devices seem to have been re-listed soon after at any concluded auction with incredibly inflated prices, suggesting a failed sale, only close to the market value of secondhand phones that actually want to be sold.

A quick look at the currently ongoing auctions shows that these phones are attracting much more reasonable prices than initial searches suggest.

It’s a bit unclear if TikTok Premium is real, but that’s not stopping people from trying. At the time of writing this article, the results for the TikTok phone search term had grown by more than 2,000 items – no doubt a sense of urgency pushed by the fact that the app could be returned to US app stores at any time.

At the moment, a TikTok search on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store is met with statements citing legal requirements as the reason the app is not available. This is despite Trump’s executive order expressly directing the Justice Department to “take no action to enforce the Act or impose any penalty against any entity for any noncompliance with the Act”.

It remains to be seen whether anxiety subsides and TikTok reappears before the 75 days are up — as Trump makes any deal in between — but those exiled from their favorite video-sharing app aren’t entirely without options. this week, Thousands of users Another Chinese-owned social media platform, RedNote, has jumped in, leaving the app scrambling Appoint an English moderatorAlso time to try to capitalize On his new success.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is making some effort to take lost TikTokers under its wing, introducing a A flurry of new featuresAnd even as big influencers offer $5,000 to join Its platform.