Used smartphones with TikTok installed are being sold on eBay for $14,000 — as the video platform remains unavailable on U.S. app stores.
On Sunday, American social media users woke up to find that they no longer had access to TikTok, after the law — which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court — banning it on national security grounds came into effect.
However, TikTok resumed services hours later and restored access to its 170 million users in the U.S. after Trump said he would issue an executive order to give the app a reprieve when he took office.
However, despite this, Google and Apple still have not reinstated TikTok in their app stores. This has meant that American users, who deleted TikTok during the blackout, have been locked out with no way to re-install the video app.
According to a report by Wired, some eBay users have used this opportunity to cash in and are selling their used smartphones, with TikTok still downloaded on the devices, for thousands of dollars on the online marketplace.
The publication reports that a quick search for “TikTok phone” brings up more than 9,000 listings of second-hand smartphones all with the TikTok app already installed.
Many of these used smartphones are listed on eBay in the $2,000 to $5,000 price range. However, in one case, an eBayer has listed an Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max complete with the TikTok app for $50,000.
Meanwhile, another eBay user appears to have sold their Apple iPhone 15 Pro with both the TikTok and CapCut app installed for $13,997.00 on Monday.
CapCut is the popular video editing app used by millions of TikTok creators and is owned by TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance. When the law banning TikTok on national security grounds came into effect on Sunday, CapCut also went dark in the U.S..
While Capcut resumed services again on Monday, it is still not showing up as available in Apple or Google’s app stores — prompting opportunistic eBayers to profit from this blackout too.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos and center photos via eBay.
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