PSA: Don’t buy a $4,400 gray market Samsung TriFold on eBay

I had to buy Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold From eBay for $4399 and I’m sure it’s because Samsung doesn’t want anyone to actually own this phone. I’m also afraid to turn it on.

Not that turning it on does much good. When I click Start to set it up, it prompts me to provide a USIM and refuses to let me proceed without one. I don’t trust this phone enough to put a SIM card in it. The phone still needs a SIM card. We are at a dead end.

In theory, it was Samsung’s ambitious TriFold On sale in the US since January 30 (Retail price: $2,899), but it was nearly impossible to get one. For any other phone launch, we usually use a review unit on loan from the manufacturer; Samsung PR did not provide a TriFold review unit for Edge. We tempted to buy our own phone, but the phone went out of stock within minutes of going on sale the first time.

Weeks passed — weeks in which I asked Samsung’s PR people in vain if they were absolutely sure there wasn’t a device I could borrow — and the TriFold remained out of stock. Contact retail stores; They didn’t have anything to sell me. The phone is gone Back in stock briefly in FebruaryBut again, it was sold out before we could get all the company’s credit card details. In fact, how many of these nearly $3,000 phones does Samsung sell in a matter of minutes? I strongly suspect that there are not many of them, and the scarcity effect is a feature of offering only a few phones at a time, not a bug.

In desperation, we turned to eBay. By sifting through sellers with no reviews, who somehow wanted to come back and sell an expensive phone they just bought for very little profit, we landed on Moderntek. The seller has a lot of positive reviews and appears to have a set of TriFolds on sale for $4,399 each. (We don’t recommend you buy it here, let alone at all.) It’s worth noting that while the TriFold has been on sale for longer in other parts of the world, it’s not in plentiful supply anywhere else at the moment. It’s also listed as unavailable on Samsung’s Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese websites.

They promised us the phone would arrive in early March; Early March came and we discovered it had not shipped yet. The seller quickly responded to our questions with a confusing message about logistical issues and ignored orders. Suddenly, it was scheduled to arrive in two days, as it shipped from Scottsdale, Arizona, not Hong Kong, as the original tracking number indicated.

The package arrived Monday without any fuss — just a retail box inside a FedEx bubble mailer. Covering the seam on one side of the box were two seals – one in Chinese and the other in white at the top in English. I have never seen this type of sticker on a phone shipped by the manufacturer. It read: “Do not accept if seal is broken.” Under the label, the box paper was boiling. My great “tamper-proof seal” makes people ask a lot of questions that have already been answered by the power of my anti-tamper seal.

I cut both seals and opened the box. There it was: the TriFold I was so excited to get. The protective film on the inner screen peeled off easily, and I was able to figure out why: bits of hair and crumbs were lining the adhesive. I’m pretty sure Samsung doesn’t send phones out of the factory this way.

There was another unpleasant surprise waiting for me: when I turned on the phone, it was already set up. Furthermore, an app I didn’t recognize triggered a pop-up almost immediately, requesting a long list of unclear permissions. I pressed reject and factory reset the phone. The phone responded, but now insists that I need a SIM card to continue setup. I can’t find a way to bypass this requirement, and I’ve set up a lot of Android phones without a physical SIM card. I don’t even have one at the moment anyway (thanks a lot, eSIM).

So this is where I am. Do I have a $4,400 phone full of malware? My dealings with the seller and Some quick Google search It’s not some kind of sophisticated phishing scheme – it’s more likely just some usual eBay shenanigans, perhaps to hook us up with expensive restocking fees, she points out. I’ve asked Samsung to confirm some details about the model that was shipped to me; I didn’t get any answers from them.

This whole damn endeavor has led me to one conclusion: Samsung doesn’t actually want to sell TriFolds. If you do, the company will simply do it Make more of them and sell them. No, Samsung wants us to do that He wants Tri-fold. TriFold is ambitious. makes $2000 Z Fold 7 With one hinge it seems like a hell of a deal. This is its job. If the functionality of this phone really existed, it would be there. If this is a paradigm-shifting technological breakthrough, it will be in the hands of every tech reviewer in the country — not a handful of influencers, for the most part. Meanwhile, I have an expensive paperweight on my desk and a Money Back Guarantee order to submit to eBay.

Photography by Alison Johnson/The Verge