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

I had to buy Samsung’s Galaxy Z TriFold on eBay for $4,399 and I’m pretty sure it’s because Samsung doesn’t want anyone to own this phone. I’m also afraid to turn it on.

Not that turning it on does much good. Every time I press “start” to set it up, a prompt to provide a “USIM” appears and refuses to let me progress without one. I don’t trust this phone enough to put a SIM card in it. The phone keeps wanting a SIM card. We are at an impasse.

In theory, Samsung’s ambitious TriFold has been on sale in the United States since January 30 (street price: $2,899), but it has been almost impossible to get one. For any other phone launches, we will typically use a review unit on loan from the manufacturer; Samsung PR did not provide a TriFold review unit for The edge. We resigned ourselves to buying ours, but the phone was out of stock within minutes of it first going on sale.

Weeks passed – weeks in which I asked Samsung PR in vain if they were absolutely sure I didn’t have one I could borrow – and the TriFold remained stubbornly out of stock. I called retail stores; They didn’t have any to sell me. The phone was briefly returned to stock in February, but again it sold out before we could capture all of the company’s credit card details. Really, how many of these nearly $3,000 phones does Samsung sell in minutes? I strongly suspect there aren’t many, and the scarcity effect is a feature of only offering a handful of phones at a time, not a bug.

In desperation, we turned to eBay. Sifting through sellers with no ratings, who somehow wanted to turn around and sell a very expensive phone they just bought for very little profit, we landed on Moderntek. The seller has many positive reviews and apparently a bunch of TriFolds for sale for a cool $4,399 each. (We don’t recommend buying it here, let alone at all.) It’s worth noting that while the TriFold has been on sale longer in other parts of the world, it’s currently not abundant elsewhere. It is also listed as out of stock on Samsung’s Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese websites.

We were promised that the phone would arrive in early March; Early March came and we found out it hadn’t even been shipped yet. The seller responded quickly to our questions with a confusing message about logistics issues and overlooked orders. Suddenly, it was due to arrive in a few days – shipped from Scottsdale, Arizona, not Hong Kong, as the original tracking number indicated.

The package arrived Monday without any fanfare – just a retail box in a FedEx bubble mailer. Two seals covered the seam on one side of the box: one in Chinese and a white one on top in English. I’ve never seen this kind of label on a phone shipped by the manufacturer. It said: “DO NOT ACCEPT IF THE SEAL IS BROKEN. » Under the sticker, the paper in the box was bubbling. Great energy “my tamper-proof seal makes people ask a lot of questions that my tamper-proof seal has already answered”.

I cut both seals and opened the box. Here it is: the TriFold that I was so excited to get my hands on. The protective film on the inner screen peeled off easily and I could see why: bits of hair and crumbs were covering the adhesive. I’m pretty sure Samsung doesn’t ship phones from the factory like that.

Another unpleasant surprise awaited me: when I turned on the phone, it was already configured. On top of that, an app I didn’t recognize triggered a pop-up almost immediately, asking for a long list of sketchy permissions. I pressed Decline and reset the phone to factory settings. The phone accepted, but now insists that I need a SIM card to continue setup. I can’t find a way around this requirement and have set up many Android phones without a physical SIM card. Anyway, I don’t even have one at the moment (thanks very much, eSIM).

So that’s where I am. Do I have a $4,400 phone riddled with malware? My interactions with the seller and some quick Google searches suggest that this isn’t some sort of sophisticated phishing scheme – rather, it’s just classic eBay bait-and-switch shenanigans, possibly to hook us in for an expensive restocking fee. I asked Samsung to confirm some details about the model shipped to me; I received no response from them.

This whole damn business has led me to only one conclusion: Samsung doesn’t actually want to sell TriFolds. If this were the case, the company make more and sell them. No, Samsung wants us to want a TriFold. The TriFold is ambitious. That makes the $2,000 Z Fold 7 with a single hinge quite a deal. It’s his job; if the work of this phone were to actually exist, then it would exist. If this were a groundbreaking technological achievement, it would be in the hands of every technology evaluator in the country — not a handful of, mostly, influencers. In the meantime, I have a very expensive paperweight on my desk and a “Money Back Guarantee” application to file with eBay.

Photography by Allison Johnson/The Verge