Despite the fact that Donald Trump has postponed the ban on TikTok in the United States, the app is still unavailable for download from the App Store or Google Play. This has led users who have lost access to the app for various reasons to buy smartphones with TikTok installed on eBay and Facebook Marketplace, TechSpot reports.
Prices for smartphones with TikTok preinstalled have skyrocketed. Some devices are up for sale for tens of thousands of dollars. For example, you can find an iPhone 14 Pro Max with a price of $999,999, which is almost 1000 times its original cost.
In total, there are more than 49,000 ads on eBay for "tiktok phone". Of course, most of the sales are made at more affordable prices, but there are cases when TikTok smartphones were bought for more than $20,000.
By the way, using the situation with the removal of popular applications to make a profit is not a new phenomenon. For example, after Flappy Bird was removed from stores in 2014, phones with this game were sold on eBay at high prices. A similar thing happened in 2015, when the P.T. demo was removed from the PlayStation Store, and PS4s with the game appeared at auctions at significantly inflated prices.