Second-hand mobile phones have Installed TikToks sell for thousands of dollars on eBay. It looks like some people might actually buy them.

TikTok remains absent from all U.S. app stores, and Apple and Google have given no indication whether it will, despite U.S. President Donald Trump signing an executive order on Monday delaying any potential ban on the social media app for 75 days. return. This means that if you delete the app or lose your phone in the US, you are currently locked from downloading it again. For content creators, brand marketers, and social media managers, this could spell disaster. And it's also very expensive.

Opportunistic eBayers took advantage of this unfortunate opportunity to make a killing. A quick search for "TikTok phone" turns up more than 9,000 listings for used smartphones from companies like Apple and Samsung, all of which have the TikTok app installed.

This can be accomplished by the seller logging out of the iCloud or Google account associated with the device rather than restoring the phone to factory settings. Any buyer then needs to be careful not to sync to any existing cloud backup to avoid losing the app they paid a lot of money to get.

Some of these phones are listed for as much as $50,000 under eBay's "buy it now" sales model, but it's hard to believe that anyone actually thought their phones would fetch that price, and there's no indication that they did.

There are many more priced between $2,000 and $5,000, but as to whether anyone will actually buy them at that price, it still seems unlikely.

What can be said is that despite the price increase, yes interest. these mobile phones yes It is for sale, but it is difficult to determine how much it will cost. Selecting the "Sold" filter in an eBay search reveals a large number of sales that appear to have been completed, but nearly all of them carry an undisclosed "Best Offer Accepted" annotation.

Any completed auctions with unbelievably high prices appear to be relisted soon after, suggesting the sale was unsuccessful and only those phones approaching the market value of used phones were likely to actually sell.

A quick look at currently ongoing auctions will also show more reasonable prices than an initial search might show.

The true impact of TikTok's premium is unclear, but that hasn't stopped people from trying. At the time of writing, results for the TikTok mobile search term were up by more than 2,000 — no doubt fueled by the fact that the app could return to the App Store at any time.

Currently, a search for TikTok in either app store encounters statements from Google and Apple citing legal requirements as the reason the app is unavailable in their stores. This is despite Trump's executive order explicitly instructing the Justice Department to "take no action to enforce the Act or impose any penalties on any entity that fails to comply with the Act."

Whether TikTok will reappear before the 75-day period is up remains to be seen — as will any deal Trump strikes in the meantime — but those exiled are not entirely without options. Thousands of users flocked to another Chinese social media platform, Red Note, this week, causing the app to scramble to hire English moderators.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has also been doing its best to take lost TikTokers under its wing, rolling out a slew of familiar new features and even offering big influencers up to $5,000 to join its platform.