There’s a couple of ways they are sourced but basically:
- Buy Apple gift cards for 70-80% of face value from let’s just say dubious sources and then use that to buy phones
- Fedex or warehouse employees stealing to supplement their salaries
- Authorized retailers who break their agreement
- Buyback websites or stores where people bring phones and get paid like 60% of retail or less if it’s locked. Some of this is just people wanting to return a gift they got without asking the giver for the receipt but most of the phones bought at these kind of stores are obtained through “credit mulling” where they gather up a bunch of homeless people and pay them $20 to go into an AT&T store and get a phone on credit.
- Currency arbitrage: if the Euro drops and companies don’t update their prices and you are able to get VAT refunds then you could be able to get a phone for less than it’s American retail value. This (big drop in yen) combined with the camera shutter is why Japanese spec iPhones can be a lot cheaper.
https://www.hanggroup.com/price/ is a company with 9 figure revenue that purchases these no questions asked. You can see the most they pay for a phone is $1050 for the 14 pro max which is $50 below retail.
Also I should add carrier auctions, store bankruptcies/liquidations, gaming credit card points but these are much less common than the methods listed above.
The Nigerian or Indian scammer will usually get 40-50 cents on the dollar in their local currency or crypto from a Chinese "gift card trader" who then sells it on Paxful or in Wechat/Whatsapp groups for 10-20% more than that. The groups doing it on a large scale have "shoppers" who spend all day buying electronics with the cards for a % of the amount.
There’s a couple of ways they are sourced but basically:
- Buy Apple gift cards for 70-80% of face value from let’s just say dubious sources and then use that to buy phones
- Fedex or warehouse employees stealing to supplement their salaries
- Authorized retailers who break their agreement
- Buyback websites or stores where people bring phones and get paid like 60% of retail or less if it’s locked. Some of this is just people wanting to return a gift they got without asking the giver for the receipt but most of the phones bought at these kind of stores are obtained through “credit mulling” where they gather up a bunch of homeless people and pay them $20 to go into an AT&T store and get a phone on credit.
- Currency arbitrage: if the Euro drops and companies don’t update their prices and you are able to get VAT refunds then you could be able to get a phone for less than it’s American retail value. This (big drop in yen) combined with the camera shutter is why Japanese spec iPhones can be a lot cheaper.
https://www.hanggroup.com/price/ is a company with 9 figure revenue that purchases these no questions asked. You can see the most they pay for a phone is $1050 for the 14 pro max which is $50 below retail.