Cash for phones: Victims say local kiosks incentivize criminals
Thieves using stolen phones to make a quick buck
Stolen phones are landing in phone recycling kiosks. Victims say the lure of "quick cash" is too good for criminals to pass up.
SEATTLE - Stolen phones are landing in kiosks around Puget Sound as a way for thieves to make a quick buck.
The kiosks are easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking at. Sandwiched between other machines to count coins, cut keys and purchase lotto tickets, ecoATM has a simple message above most of their boxes—"instant cash for phones."
Detractors say the business is incentivizing thieves to steal smartphones. The company views itself as an answer to society’s endless stream of e-waste, an environmental disaster that we’ve all bought into with new phone releases coming every few months.
To power the do-it-all mobile devices we’ve come to rely on, a number of precious metals and rare-earth elements are required: gold, silver, palladium, platinum, aluminum and copper are all found in smartphones.
With a finite amount of these metals, ecoATM aims to recycle and reuse metals, but the dollar amount they’re offering is attracting thieves.
And the onus lands on the victims to get the items returned to them. According to the ecoATM website, an owner can get their phone back free of charge "as long as the customer provides us with a police report for the stolen device and written authorization from law enforcement to release the device."
In other words, to get a phone back that was stolen and sold to the company, you’ll have to figure out where the phone is, and do some legwork on your own.
THE VICTIM
"It’s a very well masked, in what is my opinion, a stolen goods trafficking ring," said Lindsey, a woman who had her iPhone 14 Pro stolen and sold to an ecoATM following a late-November football game in Seattle. "They’re incentivizing what is, unfortunately, going to end up being the disenfranchised from society who would benefit the most from quick cash."
Police departments around Puget Sound confirm that they’re familiar with ecoATM, and have routinely found stolen phones in their possession. But they also contend the company has been a helpful partner in retrieving stolen goods.
Victims of theft, such as Lindsey, say the hassle they’ve endured to retrieve their stolen goods isn’t fair and question how many people give up before realizing where their phone has gone.
Her story begins on a Saturday night when she was taking a bus home. By the time she realized the phone was missing, she spent so long searching for it that the bus stopped making runs to her neighborhood. After a long trip home, she managed to use an old device to turn on an app designed to "ping" the phone and give geo-coordinates of its location, which led her to a homeless encampment where the trail ran cold.
The following morning, after a few hours of sleep, she returned to the location. That’s when a man at the encampment told her it was likely in "a machine" at a local grocery store.
At this point, Lindsey had never heard of ecoATM. Though, she’d soon come face-to-face with the kiosk inside a QFC along Broadway in Seattle while searching for her phone.
"I go into QFC and I have all my devices," she said, recalling how she was using her ‘Find My’ app on an older-model iPhone. "It reads 40 feet, 30 feet, 20 feet, 10 feet and all the sudden, there’s a big box machine that’s like, ‘ecoATM: turn in cell phones for cash on the spot.’"
Managers allowed her to use a store phone to call the company, but they didn’t have access to the kiosk that held her phone.
Over the phone, she said an ecoATM representative said they couldn’t return the phone from the bin remotely, instead offering to return it if they’re able to locate it in their system.
"They kept saying, ‘We don’t accept phones that are marked as lost or stolen,’ even though mine was marked as lost," said Lindsey.
In Lindsey’s case, Seattle Police eventually intervened. After a long night of searching, a morning talking to people at a homeless encampment, an argument over the phone with ecoATM and a two-hour wait for officers, SPD contacted the company that runs ecoATM and managed to open the box to find a large cache of phones.
Lindsey told FOX 13 News that other phones had screens that indicated they were in ‘lost’ mode—a screen that a user can engage remotely when a phone is lost or stolen.
According to a police report, the company said they could use a barcode on the back of the phone to track down the seller and block their account – however, Lindsey told FOX 13 that the photograph of the seller was ‘blurred’ and didn’t offer police any leads.
Seattle Police did not include any details about the potential thief that would indicate what information they were able to collect.
As for Lindsey, she still had payments left on her phone that retails in the $2,000 range. She said that the number of new phones in the box that she saw when SPD opened up the kiosk had her curious about how many stolen phones were in that box.
"It’s insane," she said. "People aren’t turning in their brand-new phones. They’re just incentivizing people to commit crimes."
LAW ENFORCEMENT
A number of law enforcement groups around Puget Sound were quick to respond to questions about ecoATM.
The make-a-buck kiosk is well-known among various detective agencies.
When asked via email, one Everett Police officer said a detective had just wrapped up a case involving three stolen phones a few days prior.
A Tacoma Police spokesperson told us they regularly have reports of people who find their missing or stolen phones in ecoATMs.
Puyallup Police say they’ve had more than a dozen stolen phones wind up in ecoATMs in the past year or two, and those are just the cases they’re aware of.
When asked whether they track the number of stolen phones that they have received per month, or per year, an ecoATM spokesperson responded without answering the question. Instead, they disputed other questions posed by FOX 13 News about their security features that allowed us to retrieve cash for phones that were marked as "stolen."
Multiple law enforcement agencies reported that ecoATM was a helpful partner to law enforcement. If a device that has been reported stolen appears in their warehouse, they’ve been known to return the device quickly. When a device has evidentiary value beyond a simple stolen phone, the picture taken by the kiosk of the seller can also be beneficial.
However, those who’ve been the victim of phones stolen and eventually sold to ecoATM have a very different view. And it’s unclear how many phones are stolen without the owner ever realizing that someone was paid cash.