Making a deal at ecoATM

Cellphones and tablets, even stolen ones, can be exchanged for cash at kiosks

One of more than 7,000 kiosks in the U.S. where you can sell your phones and tablets for cash. Just don’t forget to wipe it.

There’s a green and white kiosk at Safeway called ecoATM. It promises cash for cellphones. Here’s how it works: You insert a phone, it’s worth is evaluated, and then an offer is made that can be accepted or declined.

When I’ve seen the ecoATM used at Safeway, it’s by guys draped in backpacks and hoodies. No judgment, I dress similarly. A person on Reddit dubbed the ecoATM “a stolen property redemption machine” and showed a photo of two people at a Fred Meyer with stacks of phones to sell.

Something I saw months ago makes more sense now. A woman tried to snatch a cellphone from the hands of a well-dressed woman walking down Northwest 12^th Avenue with two other women. The stylish woman fought back impressively well, and they all kicked up a hell of a racket. A passerby stepped in and punched the thief just hard enough to get her to go away, and the phone was saved. At the time, I wondered why the thief wanted the phone so badly, not understanding the black market or all the other potential a stolen phone might have.

A Safeway staffer told me the ecoATM is often broken, and sometimes the police come to open it up, because Safeway can’t. Apparently, if a phone has been reported as stolen and a person tries to sell it at the ecoATM, the kiosk goes into lockdown. Hang on, is this like truTV’s old show “Bait Car,” where cars are set as traps and then the cops come in for an arrest? Unlikely, but that would be neat.

Let’s give it a whirl. I have a few old cellphones laying around. One is my daughter’s super-old Ipod Touch, the other an iPhone with a cracked screen. But EcoATM needs for the phone to have a charge, at least most of the time. Mine didn’t. So I decided to just deposit the phones hoping they’d stay out of the landfill. Sure, I could do that at my carrier, but that would be boring. Anyway, while my phone was being scanned the EcoATM screen shared supportive messages like, “did you know that there are an estimated 7.2 billion active SIM cards on the planet? That’s more than our planet’s population!” A stranger message seemed to urge something deeper than mere recycling: “33% of people use cellphones to avoid interacting with people.” As I thought about that I hastily chucked the phones into the ecoATM and instantly regretted it, realizing I’d neither wiped nor removed the SIM cards. Oops. There’s an “I Changed My Mind” button I could have touched to retrieve the device, but decided to stick with my bad decision.

Later I called far more tech-literate friend who works as a business analyst for Solar Turbines in San Diego. They said, “whatever’s leftover there is probably not compromising but yeah, it’s best practice to wipe stuff. And, I presume this is a reputable company, the most they’re probably going to do is tear them apart and recycle them. They aren’t going to try to refurbish them and sell them because they’re so outdated.”

Main takeaways:

Report if if your phone is stolen.

Know your phone’s IMEI or unique fingerprint so that if it’s stolen you can report it to your carrier and it can be blocked.

Don’t walk around with your phone out, especially if nicely dressed.

For more information see Smokin’ Silicon’s YouTube channel, where the hosts visit a WalMart to see what happens when he tries to sell banned phones, prison phones, and a 3D-printed phone to ecoATM.