Selling 600,000 cell phones to Trump? There is no evidence.

Where is Trump’s phone? We will continue to talk about it every week. We reached out as usual to ask about the whereabouts of Trump’s phone. As usual, we are still waiting for a response. Meanwhile, some impressive alleged sales figures have gone viral – but it may be too good to be true.

This week I saw something new in my regular web searches for updates on Trump’s phone: a repeated claim that Trump Mobile has gotten nearly 600,000 pre-orders for the phone. With a $100 deposit per device, that would net Trump Mobile a tidy $60 million already.

It’s odd timing, and comes before yesterday’s open letter to the FTC from Elizabeth Warren and a group of other Democrats, calling on the agency to open an investigation into the company’s alleged “false advertising and deceptive practices.” Not everyone agrees that Trump Mobile deserves Democrats’ attention, in part because it’s assumed it’s not Which Many people will likely have set aside money for the phone in the first place. As one of the commentators on My story yesterday “I can’t imagine that many people were stupid enough to fall for that,” he suggested. But according to these new numbers, there were more than half a million people.

There’s just one problem: I can’t find any evidence that this number is correct. In fact, it appears to go back to X’s anonymous post, a microcosm of how the modern media landscape and AI-powered chatbots combine to give lies a sheen of respectability.

I saw this number for the first time in all places Topic feed from California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press officewhich shared a screenshot of a tweet of Grok’s summary making the claim. Trustworthy, right?

the Last Grok He cites “reports from sources such as luck, NPRand The Guardian“For 600,000 pre-orders, but a quick search through their recent production shows no sign of the number. I wanted to know where Grok got it from, if not there.”

A quick Google search shows a huge number of social media posts, from accounts both large and small, but also some stories in posts that appear to be legitimate. India Economic times and Hindustan Times Both reported a more specific figure of 590,000 pre-orders, referring to an unspecified number news agency Report as a source.

The only recent AP coverage of Trump Mobile was This story is from last weekrecaps recurring delays, and which does not prompt specific pre-order numbers. I reached out to the organization, and Vice President of Corporate Communications Lauren Easton assured me that “AP’s original stories never contained such a number.”

The plot is thickening. I tried the authors of both stories quoted by the AP, and one of them came back to me. Hindustan Times Writer Shamik Banerjee called the quote a “typo,” and told me the number was actually taken from Times of India.

the Times of India storywhich is sent only to the newspaper’s lifestyle desk, is more transparent in its source: a viral post by a meme account.

Bricktop_NAFO, an apparently British account with just over 99,000 followers, posts mostly pro-Ukrainian content, interspersed with memes and unrelated joke posts. She’s a regular in anti-Trump posts as well, and on January 11, she shared the claim that “590,000 idiots bought Trump’s cellphone (sic) that went on sale.”

As far as I can tell, this is the oldest online mention of the number 590,000, although the number 600,000 appeared in Facebook post back in DecemberEven if there are no likes or comments, just one private share. By contrast, Bricktop_NAFO’s post has been viewed 2.8 million times according to X and has been retweeted another 8,000 times. It’s ground zero for this particular strain of misinformation.

I reached out to Bricktop_NAFO, both in her direct messages and in a public response to the post, to ask if he had a source for the claim, but the account owner did not respond in time to post. I also asked if he could point me toward a $45 Temu phone that he claimed was identical — and my colleague Allison Johnson had previously tried and failed. To find an exact trick for T1 phoneAnd, to my knowledge, no one has succeeded in matching its spec and design sheet to an existing phone.

The ripple effect of this tweet has been impressive. The above It has been covered by multiple publications, and is now presented as fact MSN.com And the technology site Telephone square. This coverage has helped it creep into chatbots and not just Grok – both Gemini and ChatGPT were happy to confirm to me that 600,000 T1 phones have been ordered so far, with the former falsely attributing the number to news agencyand the last for Telephone square.

As for how many pre-orders for the Trump phone have already been placed? No one outside the company knows, and so far, it cannot be revealed. I asked Trump Mobile’s press office for the actual pre-order number, but, believe it or not, I haven’t heard back.

Got inside info on Trump’s cell phone or Trump’s phone? You can securely access from a personal device to tips@theverge.comor see our How to guide us page.