Although it’s unclear if there are many customers at those prices, people are advertising phones with TikTok preloaded for tens of thousands of dollars on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other online marketplaces.
Over the weekend, TikTok was momentarily unavailable to users in the United States; but, as of Sunday, everyone who had already downloaded it could use it. Anyone who didn’t think to download TikTok before Sunday is out of luck because the software is still not accessible on the Google and Apple app stores.
Consequently, some enterprising individuals are offering smartphones and tablets loaded with TikTok and additional apps from its parent company ByteDance, like video editor CapCut and Lemon8. On Friday, you could see postings on eBay for as little as $340 or as much as $50,000. The phones that are selling for hundreds of dollars have drawn the highest bids, however it’s unclear how many of these have been sold.
Nicholas Matthews, a New York-based seller, claimed that after realizing how popular TikTok was, he made the decision to sell the phone. He put up a $10,000 TikTok listing for an iPhone 14 Plus. According to Matthews, his best bid as of Friday was $4,550.
He stated, “I’m only hoping to sell this one phone.”
In the United States, TikTok has over 170 million users. Individual users are not targeted by the prohibition because, in theory, they are allowed to use it for as long as they like.
A message seeking comment on the ads on Friday was not immediately answered by Ebay.
President Donald Trump instructed his Justice Department earlier this week to postpone the ban’s implementation until the beginning of April. However, there are still many unanswered concerns, such as whether Trump has the power to issue such an order and whether TikTok’s parent company in China would be open to selling the well-known social media site.
— The Associated Press’s Barbara Ortutay
