OT: What on Earth is going on with my eBay iphone auction?!?
 

I'm selling an iPhone 4 on eBay, unlocked, 32gb, heavily used otter box with 7 months of Applecare Plus left and one replacement and the bidding hit $400 with 6 days to go. This makes absolutely zero sense to me and I'm concerned that there is a data theft potential that I am unaware of, or people who pay with bad credit cards and stick you. Why would my used iPhone sell for $400?!? I've noticed that nearly all bids are international...do these go higher over seas?

I tend to worry when things are too good to be true, especially with intl. bidding, and this seems too good to be true.

I've no idea but what are completed listings for your model?

Intl buyer for something like that would scare me.

The iPhones are not as widely available overseas AFAIK.
Also without the contract those phones are still 500 or so

And since it's eBay, the bidder will probably just blow you off and not pay anyway. Seems to be the norm these days, and there's not much sellers can do about it.

It scares me too, but I forgot to change the setting and I'm Used to inter national bike transactions. This just seems weird to me.

I've heard horror stories about people mining data from used smart phones, just be careful it's really wiped (not that I know how to do something like that).

I've got a drawer full of old phones because I'm too paranoid to sell them...

That's one of the things I'm worried about. I did some brief research and it seemed to indicate that blackberry and iPhones are safe while google and the windows OS aren't.

Yes, they do go for higher overseas.

There's only one way to ensure that the data on your iPhone is safe though -> http://youtu.be/qg1ckCkm8YI

Cancel the auction and relist for domestic bids only.

That's what I was looking for. I did some checking and this doesn't seem THAT out of line for one that's unlocked. The unlocked ones seem to go for a LOT more, which also doesn't make much sense since there are so many people who can unlock them at low prices.

Umm...it makes some sense that unlocked phones are still priced higher. I recall about 1.5 years back when I was scouting for unlocked phones, I realised that the iphone 3 and previous iterations were relatively easy to jailbreak/unlock. However iphone 3GS onwards, the process to jailbreak was made slightly more involved. I have no idea how much more complicated, but I have it on credible sources that it needed some rough-handed work like cutting the SIM card to an apt size, etc in addition to the software manipulations. This did go some way to dissuade the non tech-savvy, imprecise, free-loaders who were charging money to run a free software on a lazy customer's phone, and hence the increased price of an unlocked iphone 3GS onwards.

On a related note about data protection on the iphone, only yesterday I came across information from an industry expert that the iphone (definitely 5) is the only phone on the market to be using ECC to maintain the privacy of the file system. This in essence implies that all the information on your iphone can be immediately destroyed by destroying just 200 bytes of information i.e. your ECC key, which I presume can only be accessed via a software functionality since ECC in itself is an arcane mathematical crypto implementation which no end-user needs to know in detail. The easiest way to identify which iphone models are capable of this feature is to perhaps do a search of iphone+ECC, etc. Hope this helps.

I sold a 3G and a water-damaged 4 about 18 months ago. Both went to overseas buyers and both went for much more than I would have expected. I wiped both before listing. Received payment in full and never had any issue since. My understanding is that the iPhone is not universally available and out-of-contract phones are in demand. My hunch is that if you limit your listing to domestic sales you'll see the bids come in substantially lower.

Prices for unlocked iphones overseas are out of control. You could be looking at a big sale.
Use common sense.

i used to wait in line for the latest, greatest iPhone, and then turn around and sell it for about 1,000 online to someone in china, anyone in china. never had a problem.

several times i've had iPhones, used them, and then had them replaced because of issues with the phone...then used them a little, and sold them as little used...and still got big bucks....$400 and more.

just make sure to do a system reset to erase all personal data before selling

Probably you have a chinese sucker wanting to have the real thing instead of the fake one, and thats why the thing is going to the roofs.

Makes me think if its a good deal to flip phones at ebay tho... 100 to 300 bucks earnings looks sweet if you actually can get the buyer to pay for the phones.