Some B.C. consumers who were able to get their hands on one of the red-hot limited Apple store reservations to buy the new iPhone 5 are selling them for a profit online.
A quick scan of the online buy-and-sell site Craigslist turned up dozens of ads from people offering either to stand in line to wait for a phone at their local Apple outlet or sell the model they have a reservation to buy in store.
Here’s how it works. The buyer goes into the store with the seller and picks out the iPhone 5 model they want. When it comes time to pay, the seller allows the buyer to purchase it on their own, meaning the Apple factory warranty goes under their own name.
Buying someone else’s reservation comes with risks. While many legitimate sellers use the site, scam artists and price gougers often take advantage when there’s a strong demand – and limited supply – for a hot item. There’s also the additional cost -- some ads hawking the 64-gig model are listed for $250 above the price on the Apple website.
One Vancouver Craigslist posting advertised an unlocked 16GB model for a whopping $2,500. The post reads: “Why $2,500? Because you can have the phone DAYS before all others. You can’t put a price on that!!!”
Many of the major telecommunications carriers are sold out of the popular phone, so their customers are facing a month-long backlog.
Apple sold more than two million iPhone 5s in the first 24-hours of presales. That’s double the one million iPhone 4S models that the company sold during the first day of pre-orders when the device was launched in November 2011.
