Stay safe out there, May 2018

We, as sellers, exist to get quality products into the right hands, wherever that maybe. As people make plays for the newest technology and discard their previous phones, it’s up to us to find new homes for the old ones (and there are willing buyers, as evidenced by the numbers reflecting the growth of the industry). We would all like to believe that our stock has been acquired cleanly and honestly, 100% of the time. Unfortunately that can’t always be the case.

Petty thieves regularly steal phones hoping to turn them around for a quick sale and a quick buck. At the end of April, a police raid in Noida, India uncovered a gang of mobile phone thieves who sold their stolen wares on OLX, complete with fake technical specifications. Storefront also deal in the selling of ill-gotten tech; a raid by Mumbai police in early 2018 revealed that a phone repair shop knowingly accepted stolen phones and reselling them. It can’t be accident – the owner fled from the police and is still missing!

It goes deeper still. In 2014, a globe-spanning organized smartphone theft ring was busted in Minnesota, wherein a family-run organization known as the Mustafa Organization instructed runners to not just steal phones, but also acquire them as part of bogus service provider contracts using stolen and false identities, and resell them as new in Mustafa-owned mobile stores in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area of Minnesota, as well as the black markets of the Middle East and China. Often, the runners would purchase and activate multiple phones – sometimes as many as thirty – under a single user account! Twenty-one people were indicted, with the ones spearheading the operation sentenced to anywhere between 87 and 130 months in prison. Per stopcellphonetrafficking.com, phone trafficking is a serious issue that harms the mobile phone industry; it has cost the American sector up to $1 billion, which in turn cheats consumers by raising prices worldwide. Trafficking also enables criminal activities, from ponzi schemes to terrorist activity.

There exist a plethora of articles that warn consumers about the possible risks of buying used mobile phones, both as a hand-me-down and through online retailers. Stories abound of mobile phones that were bought and thought to be in perfect working condition, only to be reported as stolen and have their phones rendered inoperable. What’s more, communicating the problem to the seller, manufacturer, and even the police are of no use at all, leaving the consumer to eat the loss on his own, not to mention in the lurch.