Automated Machines To Recycle Phones For Money 135
judgecorp writes "EcoATM is going to install machines which give money for old phones across the U.S. The system, shown at CES, takes a photo of any phone or other gadget put in its tray, and provides a data cable (for every kind of phone?) to check it is working. The machine offers a quote based on the current used price, and pays up on the spot."
shut up (Score:1)
and take my cellphone
Re:shut up (Score:4, Insightful)
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take my plastic replica with a 5$ microcontroller that pretends it's an iphone
I doubt they'll pay out more than $5 per phone anyway. It's meant ot be an alternative to dropping them in the trash, not a way to get a fair resale price.
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Steal a phone! Now you can get instaCash (tm) for it!
Yeah, this does seem a very easy for criminals to get rid of stolen phones easily. Still, there's plenty of other ways I suppose.
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Using it to knowingly misrepresent for fraud, even to a vending machine or kiosk, definitely isn't legal. I doubt advertising a tool as such is acceptable either.
of course not (Score:2)
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But what prevents theft? Steal an iPhone, slip it in the machine and instant money! Currently you have to wait hours to find a craigslist buyer or pawn it fast but at least the phone is still there for recovery. I'm sure you can't open it to see if your stolen phone is in there so you'll never know.
Re:of course not (Score:5, Insightful)
These machines are not going to hand out cash like an ATM, because they'd have to be refilled and they'd have to be more secure.
The machines will probably require you to insert an ATM card or credit card, so your identity will be associated with the transaction and the stolen phone you just tried to sell it. Even better, maybe they'll give you a coupon or "gift card" good for 10% off a new phone (upon activation of 2 year contract).
Eventually, the penalty for selling a stolen phone to this machine will be death, because you tried to take money from a corporation. Stealing the phone itself will carry a penalty of a $5 fine because all you did was steal from a human being.
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dunno, the vid I saw few months ago, hell, maybe even 8 months+ ago, about these things looked like they'd be placed in places like atm would be placed into. the place would be secure. it would have to be like that anyways, with some human on some desk seeing what's happening. otherwise you could screw with them, cut the connectors etc vandalism.
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Did you notice if they were dispensing cash or gift cards or writing onto a credit/debit card?
I cannot believe that there will be machines that will dispense cash to an anonymous person who walks up and connects a cellular phone.
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I do several times a week. They're called "ATMs" and they seem to work pretty well. Just pop that sucker in there, type in a PIN number (mine is 1234) and then hit the Fast Cash, $100 button on the touch screen. Crisp bills come flying out. If you listen carefully, you can hear the machine licking it's robotic thumb as it snaps off those five double-sawbucks like a pimp at a rolling crap game.
I don't know, d
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But what prevents theft? Steal an iPhone, slip it in the machine and instant money!
Instant pocket money. It will pay a scrap dealer's price, probably a few dollars. Better than nothing, but you'd be a fool to use it for a working (stolen) iPhone. It's meant as alternative to just binning it.
We have a local electronics scrap dealer. He paid me $2 for my old 17" CRT monitor, still on working order. Cost about $200 new, 10 years ago. But I didn't need it and after a week advertising it online, clearly no one else did either, so it was literally $2 or nothing, and at least it'll get recycl
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Also, good luck selling one. If it is in good working order, is clean, and is a high end screen like a Sony Trinitron you might be able to get someone to take it
Great. (Score:3, Funny)
All that, and still no Suicide Booths.
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Stealing phones? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stealing phones? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Stealing phones? (Score:4, Funny)
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iPhence
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I'll foil the system by using a stolen bank card!
You'll never catch me, nyaaah!
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Declined (Score:2)
So I paid cash for a prepaid debit card. Now what?
No home billing zip code? Declined.
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That too was my initial reaction to the idea. I guess it's not hard to imagine how this could be used for bad purposes.
Re:Stealing phones? (Score:5, Informative)
From their FAQ:
What happens if my phone is stolen and someone tries to cash it in?
ecoATM kiosks have a variety of features in place specifically to deter stolen phones from entering our system. These features include the ability to capture;
Drivers License or Govt ID
Credit card
Digital signature
Fingerprint
Picture / Video of consumer via webcam
Address & email
Date & location of transaction
Details of what was collected, including the serial number
ecoATM kiosks are also capable of refusing to transact any phones found in the databases that tract reported stolen phones.
Presumably which ones are actually used will vary from country to country and according to the agreement with the retailer who hosts the unit.
I'm sure the determined thief can find their way around these. But then they can already sell to a pawn broker or on ebay. A few of the dumber criminals might get caught.
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Why is Square (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_(application) [wikipedia.org]) doing gangbusters then?
Final Fantasy (Score:2)
Why is Square doing gangbusters then?
Trading on the inertia of Square Enix's Final Fantasy brand, I guess. If you meant some other Square, I don't know because Wikipedia has been shut down. Hopefully I'll have a more thoughtful reply tomorrow.
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Now that the strike is over for now, as promised:
"Square charges a fee of 2.75% on every credit card transaction." This is in addition to the roughly $350 per year that I'd have to pay to upgrade from a $7 per month* dumbphone to a $35 per month** smartphone capable of running the application.
* Virgin Mobile USA's cheapest advertised payLo (dumbphone) plan costs $20 per 90 days.
** Virgin Mobile USA's cheapest advertised Beyond Talk (smartphone) plan.
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> Sometime in the future, it's quite possible that we will live in a cashless society. Lord knows the Federal Gov want's to tract each and every transaction. It would cut down on violent crime, drug abuse, and prevent tax evasion. It would also save by not having the Treasury create physical currency. It would also allow them to inject more money (inflation) in real-time into the system via a few keystrokes sort of speak.
Um, ... good?
The first thing that occurs to me is that the very first thing that wil
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I've been having the same problem recently. I used to be quite good about "you're/your" and now I'm doing things like "flease (fleece)."
Not sure if getting old, or need emergency CT Scan... </Fry>
Pair a grammar correction with a topical reply (Score:2)
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eBay's far less risky. A pawnshop and this machine have very good reasons to want to make their systems either lowball stolen phones or not accept them at all - it costs the company money.
Stolen property may be taken to be returned to the owner. This means the new owner (the pawnshop or the company behind this machine) will lose possession
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So let me get this straight -- the machine can verify my driver's license and my credit card and my finger print? Hell with stealing mere cell phones, it's the machine itself that's the real gem.
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Agreed. Also you're putting a machine out in the wild that has intimate access to all these sources of information. Someone creating false ids would really *need* one 'a' those.
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That said, most operators will flag an IMEI as stolen quite quickly
These machines will be found in shopping malls. What if the thief tries to fence the phone to a machine in the same mall as where he "found" it in a handbag? The victim may not yet know that her phone is gone, much less made a deposition at the police station and listed the IMEI...
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Seems stealing phones just got a lot less risky...
Also setting someone up to take the fall. If they're not complete idiots they'll demand an address to send a check to.
So, let say I want to set up AliasMrAlias and I know his address (This is 100% hypothetical, I have nothing against you, no idea where you live other than probably planet Earth, it just makes a better story). Buy a burner phone, maybe a $20 virgin mobile phone at Target or whatever. Recycle it and provide AliasMrAlias's public available address and contact information. File a police repo
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The follow up to your little hypothetical story is that the police examine the video footage of the automated fencing machine, see it was you, not him that sold the phone to it, and give you (or the hypothetical individual) 5-10 for identity theft (or whatever the hell framing someone for a crime falls under). Or compare fingerprints that the machine required. Either would be pretty easy to require (via face recognition or a thumb-scanner). In any case, they certainly wouldn't take the information the selle
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No go. If you live in socal this won't work but up north just wear a coat and hat. Unless they have a human examine your picture before completing the order, you simply put on a ski mask.
Obviously they'll find my fingerprints all over my phone, after all I was using it until supposedly AliasMrAlias stole it.
Thumb scanner biometrics are soooooooo owned and easily falsifiable that they're meaningless. They're like lie detectors, people outside the business think they're god and people inside the business k
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Not fingerprints on the phone, fingerprints recorded in the machine -- it has a scanner and requires a fingerprint from the seller (among other measures, such as scanning an ID card / driver's license). Read their FAQ.
Yay, $5 (Score:3)
that's what my 2-year-old feature phone was worth used.
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Yea! Profit! Given that if was almost certainly free* when you got it.
(*Free with a contract.)
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And? I paid the contract price; the carrier got its money back and then some. The phone by itself is obviously worth more than $5.
It's the same sort of artificially distorted used market you see in college textbooks here in the States.
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Yes, but that may change in the future - with smartphones all popular, who wants a feature phone these days? In a year or two it'll be an iPhone 3GS that's "at the end of its life", and that'll be worth much more than $5 (or at least I should hope so)...
Cracked screen? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a nice idea, but surely the condition of the device matters too? I'm sure a cracked iPhone 4S wouldn't be worth as much as one in mint condition.
What do these recycling companies do with these phones anyway?
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This is a nice idea, but surely the condition of the device matters too? I'm sure a cracked iPhone 4S wouldn't be worth as much as one in mint condition.
That's what I was thinking too, the glass might be cracked, the display broken but it could still "work" for this machine. Perhaps they will take photos as well and compare against a reference? If you control the camera, lighting, distance and have an exact model reference picture you should be able to see most kinds of visual damage...
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Yes, as it says in the summary, they take photos. And they do it with the data cable plugged in, so presumably they can force the phone display to change, and check that the screen image looks right.
They'll accept the machine whatever condition it is in, but the value will be less if it's damaged.
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Moreover, I'm thinking it wouldn't necessarily detect the issues with my daughter's last Galaxy S, which had a wonky (but not broken) display, dead compass, dead position sensor, and dead GPS. But still worked as a phone if you could dial blind.
Re:Cracked screen? (Score:4, Interesting)
What do these recycling companies do with these phones anyway?
One division of a cell phone seller that I'm familiar with wipes them with windex, therefore marks the value up on the books to about $150 because its now "reconditioned", donates them to battered women, homeless people, etc, as 911 emergency phones, marks the $150 loss/donation on their tax return, and uses that to balance against their income earned from selling phones. Essentially its a tax dodge. Don't know how it works with separate companies or non-profit, all the donation credits in the world are useless from a tax perspective unless you have taxable profits...
The only dodge I can think of for a church would be something like take an income stream of $1M of sunday donations and 1000 junk cellphones, mark up the value of the phones to $1000 each using some windex and give them away, so you gave away $1000 * 1000 phones = $1M. Now you've got $1M cash unaccountable for, which as a good christian evangelist televangelist you can spend on cocaine and male prostitutes, in other words, blow and ... blow, I guess, while publishing that you took in $1M and some phones and send out $1M and some phones so superficially there's nothing fishy going on with the finances.
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Sorry for the follow up to my post but I hit post too early... the other dodge I'm aware of, is those "new" batteries on ebay actually are shipped in "new" plastic baggies, but guess where the batteries came from?
Never buy a battery (of any sort, not just cellphone) on ebay unless you see and can verify the manufacturing date code and that date isn't like 3 years old. Even if you see that, a bit of white plastic shrink wrap and a computer printed label has an excellent profit return if you sell the "new" b
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There, fixed that for you.
Seriously, there's so much 'spam' on eBay, that it's become virtually worthless. The last time I tried to buy anything useful from there, I spent so much time sorting through the knockoffs, scams, idiots who put unrelated keywords in their description, etc... that ('paying' myself a fair hourly wage) I wasn't saving all that much money unless I got the item at a low price on the first auction I bid in.
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There, fixed that for you.
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There, fixed that for you.
Definitely - the audit will kill you. Even if they actually did something to create a phone with a "value" of $150, they can't claim that as a loss/donation when they give it away. Giving away an item does not generate a transaction on your books that you can enter into any of your expenses categories. Giving money does. The expenses associated with reconditioned the device have already been captured by you accounting system when you bought the windex and the paper-towels.
I suppose you might be able to play
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My understanding is when transferring goods to a non-profit you can write off the full original value of the merchandise. However, someone actually has to accept the goods in the first place. Obviously, you can keep junking the same place twice.
However, it's been a while since I've dealt with a non-profit, but that is what I remember anyway.
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They sell them on auction sites, in whatever part of the world they'll have the highest value.
If they're broken or worthless for resale as phones, they sell them to recyclers who extract the gold and other precious materials in them.
Thieves? (Score:2)
One wonders how the machine will deal with thieves who've just stolen someone's newish iPhone.
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Here's a question: if your phone was stolen and someone showed up with it at one of these stations, which would you rather the station do:
1) Lowball the price, get the phone, notify the police, notify you and return the phone to you if you want, for a service fee (one might arrange to agree to this ahead of time when reporting the phone stolen.)
2) Tell the guy to go scram, taking your phone with him, and notify the police.
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Well now. (Score:2)
There's just about not anything a machine won't do for money.
Stupid. (Score:2)
Stupid idea that has a number of scams and will be a greater target for them (and just general theft).
1) Insert cardboard-box phone for photo.
2) When data cable arrives, plug into equivalent model.
3) Deposit cardboard box, walk away with cash.
4) Profit!
Who needs to insert stolen phones when the verificaiton will never be 100% accurate? What? Fraud? But the buyer saw and agreed to what they would buy! Caveat emptor!
Doing these sorts of things "human-less" is an incredibly stupid idea that's going to be r
Re:Stupid. (Score:4, Informative)
Your plan won't work. Once the data cable is plugged in, the door closes and you don't get access to your phone again unless you decide to decline the transaction.
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actually, that's highly model dependent. on most models they'd just be able to check that the usb id's are "right".
doesn't recycle (Score:2)
Also, given the cost of labor, I'd say you'll have a hard time getting this machine to be cheaper and less error prone than some shop clerk that does this work and checks your ID to make sure you're not anonymously selling stolen phones.
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The difference is the shop clerk needs a shop to operate out of.
The recycling companies won't set up shops extra for this, but instead partner with existing shops. So, the newsstand, the photo shop, or the place where you buy new phones also takes used phones on the side.
Advantage:
Failed business model (Score:2)
How much do they pay though? (Score:5, Interesting)
The big complaint I have with used cellphones, at least here in the USA, is this:
Most people obtain their new phone with a 1 or 2 year contract, so the phone's price is heavily subsidized up-front. You might get a $700 phone for $200, or a $400 phone for $50. You wind up paying its full price, of course, but only as you pay your monthly bills to finish off your contract (or pay the ETF to get out of it sooner).
Problem is, the used market generally views these devices as though their actual VALUE is relative to the subsidized prices, not the TRUE prices.
As just one example? My Sprint HTC Evo 4G is just under 1 year old right now, and when I got it, it was the "rock star" of phones on the Sprint network. There was really nothing better they could sell you, even if you wanted it. Currently, Sprint has a "trade in" offer where you can send back your old phone for credit on your future bills (not even cash!), and my Evo is worth a whopping $80, if in "excellent condition". Never-mind I'm probably still paying Sprint more than that for the phone, as I use up the remainder of the 2 year contract I had with it!
And judging from my experiences with most of the "cellphone recyclers" out there I'd talked to, I suspect they pay even LESS on average. Their business models usually revolve around the idea that plenty of people value their used phones at "basically zero", considering them a waste of space, or extra junk lying around.
If you've got a plain old flip-phone of some sort (hardly matters what make, model or how new) -- because it's used and not a "smartphone", I'd say you'd be lucky to get even $5 - $10 for it from most recyclers. That's one hell of a depreciation rate, when you consider a lot of those were "military spec" Nextels and such, that their owners only recently got done paying hundreds for in their contracts.
I've consistently found I got FAR more out of semi-recent model used cellphones by reselling them on Craigslist or even eBay, vs. recycling them. People who don't want long contracts but need reliable cellular service with a major carrier quickly realize the real value of these used phones, and are essentially the only customers you'll have who'll pay you a fair price for one.
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Worse yet, many providers still charge the same price even if you have a phone already you want to use on their network. If you don't take the contract phone, you're out even more money. That system doesn't make sense to me. I should get a discount because I didn't get a phone.
Clippy says go prepaid (Score:3)
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The word you're looking for is depreceation [wikipedia.org], and it's been a fact of life in reselling electronics since the dawn of mass consumer digital/electronic devices back in the 1980's.
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Pfft., no. The phones may have a retail price higher than the "with subsidy" price, but the real cost to the retailer is somewhere between (or less...).
Your mistake was in assuming that the phone companies were only working' one scam on you....
Darn! (Score:2)
You know what would be even more green? (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep your old phone.
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Damn. I wish I hadn't posted before seeing this post, now I can't mod it. Insightful and succinct.
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>p>
> Or give it to someone else, if you do need to upgrade for some reason. Recycling is hugely wasteful when reuse is possible.
Agreed, although giving your old one to others (which I have done under specialized circumstances) sometimes means that they throw away their old phone. Or maybe they give it to someone of even less means, I dunno... it might be like that description of the city of Minas-Trony in Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings. The city was built like a layer cake, so that the rich
That's not recycling (Score:2)
It's purchasing. Recycling means breaking the machine down to its components; metal, plastic etc.; then using those components to build more things.
I thought it was going to be a machine that crushes up phones and extracts the metals in a safe controlled manner, then grinds up the plastic for reuse. What was I thinking? The tech world is nothing but hype....
who gives a crap if it works (Score:2)
Oh thats cause this is not recycling, instead its a big box of working celphones with all sorts of valuable data on it, sitting in a thin box at the mall ready to steal or resale while your feeding it for free
sorry but fuck that
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> with all sorts of valuable data on it
How could I have missed this? Ye Gods, this is an automated phishing machine. I mean, us geeks, we'd do a factor reset and pull the SD card (if anything but an iPhone) but Fred and Ethyl Mertz would just drop the phone in the bin without thinking. Holy Carp! I think we just guaranteed the Russian economy for another decade.
Hmmm. (Score:2)
Wonder what it would give me for my t-mobile Samsung Galaxy S, with faulty GPS antenna. Probably more than t-mobile....
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Yeah, we have two of those as well.
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And all those phones will go on Ebay marked up 1000%
Probably just their batteries, relabeled and marked as "new".
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So go to ebay first, check the price.
If the difference in price isn't enough to cover P&P, and your time in listing, packaging and visiting the post office, then you might as well take the money from the machine.
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Sure, sure.. apparently not from Czech Republic, eh?