WTF?! Do you have a phone with TikTok installed? Maybe you should consider selling it on an auction site like eBay, where people are taking advantage of the app's troubles by listing these handsets for comically expensive prices.
TikTok is still unavailable on Apple's and Google's respective app stores after it was removed last weekend. The app briefly went dark on Saturday, and while services returned on Sunday, it still cannot be downloaded from the stores.
Despite Trump signing an executive order that essentially delayed the app's ban in the US for 75 days, Apple and Google have given no indication when it might return.
With no way to download the app, users who delete it by accident or lose/break their phones are left without access. Some people are addicted to TikTok, as exemplified by the teen who burned down a congressman's office in protest at the ban, and losing the app would be a huge blow to creators who make a living from it.
Thousands of people with TikTok already installed on their devices are capitalizing on the situation by selling them on platforms such as eBay and Facebook Marketplace. Searching for "phone tiktok" on eBay returns over 49,000 results.
There are certainly some optimistic sellers out there. The most expensive item is an iPhone 14 Pro Max priced at $999,999, or 90,891% above its original MSRP. That one also comes with CapCut, ByteDance's video editing app that was also temporarily banned and no longer available to download in the US.
There are lots of handsets around the mid-to-high five-figure mark – $50,000 seems a popular price.
It's easy to imagine that nobody would ever pay such ridiculous prices for these phones, but it appears that a very small number of them really have sold. Most went for undisclosed best offers, but this iPhone 16 Pro Max is listed as selling for the equivalent of $22,000, which seems highly suspicious.
It's always sensible to perform a factory reset on a phone before selling it, but doing so in these cases would wipe all apps, including TikTok. Sellers are likely just deleting all their data manually and signing out of their associated accounts, leaving the app intact.
Taking advantage of an app disappearing isn't something new. When Flappy Bird was pulled from mobile stores in 2014, phones containing the game appeared on eBay at prices ranging into the thousands. The same thing happened when P.T. was removed from the PlayStation Store in April 2015, leading to PS4 consoles with the demo installed appearing on auction sites at significantly inflated prices.