iPhones with TikTok installed are being offered on eBay for $50,000

TikTok exists in a kind of limbo at the moment, not technically closed since it received an extension to find an American buyer under the Trump administration, but it is not available in the iPhone or Android App Store due to problems with liability. So if you’re all for that sweet, sweet endless vertical video scrolling, but didn’t remember to install the app on your phone before it was banned, you’ll have to try your luck on eBay, where people sell phones preloaded with the TikTok app for thousands of dollars.

As first seen by WiredThere are currently around 9,000 eBay item listings for various smartphones that already have TikTok installed. There is a wide range of devices depending on the preferred brand, model and carrier of your phone. For example, you can get a Samsung Galaxy A54 5G equipped with TikTok at Consumer Cellular for $250 or an Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max compatible with T-Mobile for $450. But for the most part, if you want one of these TikTok machines, you’ll have to be prepared to fork out much, much more than the MSRP.

Most listings have at least three zeros at the end, putting the starting price in the thousands, like this iPhone 14 currently listed at $7,500 with, at the time of publication, a person who currently has the item in their cart. There are several listings currently asking in the tens of thousands of dollars, including one that has a list price of $50,000 (or better offer, but either way, you still have to pay shipping which seems a bit steep, frankly).

It should be noted that there is a difference between the items that are listed at these prices and the people who buy them. While some of the listings for phones with TikTok installed have thousands of views in the last 24 hours, there is much more attention than sales. Most devices that have sold, as shown by eBay’s “complete sale” filter, show that sellers often settled for an offer and not the list price. However, some people have successfully cashed in on the opportunism: There is a listing for an iPhone 16 Pro Max that shows it being sold for the $12,999 list price (although the seller has zero history on the platform, so it is possible that it is a fake sale).

A similar phenomenon like this has happened before. When Flappy Bird was all the rage and the creator finally decided to pull the app for his own personal sanity, phones that had the game installed were also sold on eBay, including one device that produced a bidding war that resulted in a winning bid of $99,900. . That sale finally it was killed by ebay because it requires all phones sold on its platform to be wiped and restored to factory settings before being shipped.

It seems that eBay still requires factory reset for devices sold through its marketplace, so hopefully sellers who sold a phone with TikTok installed didn’t spend those earnings either.