Phone recycling

I sent my old Samsung S9 which is in very good condition to meeliemobile.com after getting a quote from them of £180 on a comparison site.

Got an email from them this morning saying

Thank you for sending in your Samsung Galaxy S9 64GB which has been carefully checked over by our quality team.

Unfortunately there is a problem with your Samsung Galaxy S9 64GB.

The device we valued was in working condition with no screen faults. The device we have received has mild screen burn which is where prolonged use of the same screen/app has imprinted an image onto the screen and/or turned it pink in colour. This is not always visible during normal working conditions but visible on a white screen and unfortunately hard to photograph. We don’t like downgrading devices that we receive, however In the case of screenburn, even when the device is in great cosmetic condition, it has a degrading impact on the value. Here at Meelie Mobile we want to be as fair as possible and as such have amended our offer to the current published price for a Fair Condition device - unlike many of our competitors who would class this as faulty. Please see the following article for more information regarding screenburn: https://buyback.meeliemobile.com/information/screenburn.

o we have had to adjust the payment we are prepared to offer you to £40.00 .

I rejected that offer, then immediately got another email saying:

Due to a system error, our counter-offer was assessed at a much lower value than intended. We have adjusted our offer to £106.00. Please accept our sincerest apologies.

Is this a standard tactic to get people to accept lower offers? As far as I was aware there was no screen burn on the phone although I’d have to check it now! I went with this company because of the price but also they have great reviews on trustpilot.

Any recommendations who to use instead when (if) I get my phone back?

Thanks

Looks like CEX are buying them for around £165.

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Crikey, that is a crazy system, and it does seem designed to do exactly that. Not sure if “Dark Patterns” apply here, but I hate those kind of systems.

Most of the time I’ve used Apple’s phone trade in for convenience / desire to not be scammed, (obviously that won’t work so well for a samsung).

As an alternative I would likely look for places that either trade in as part of a contract (if that isn’t too late), or somewhere like CeX where you are in the same store and aren’t subject to dodgy post-posting deals (although the pricing is probably worse on CeX).

The last service I did use though was Plunc, and had no issues. Had a minor scratch (surface only) on the phone and they were ok with it.

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Sounds like a total scam. This is why I stick to the big name phone recyclers. I bet they only send their trust pilot links to customers who are paid the full price too.

One time with another company, I had reason to contact them two times over two separate issues in two days. I was only given their trust pilot link when they resolved my question to my satisfaction, I didn’t get given it the other time!

They have far too many five star reviews on trust pilot. Rule of thumb - ignore 1 and 5 star reviews and see what you are left with.

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Thanks. I’ll probably use Cex then I think. £165 not too bad!

@BritishLibrary I haven’t had a contract for a few years now. Tend to buy phones that have been out for a year or so and keep them for a year.

Just bought a Sony Xperia 5 on Ebay for £240, so if I can get £165 for my S9 that works out about £6/month for the phone. I’m on Voxi £10/month plan which is plenty enough for what I use.

Yeah, it was the trustpilot reviews that persuaded me. Should have known to take them with a pinch of salt to be fair

That sounds so dodgy! I wonder how many people take the first offer “If it’s not worth anything, £40 is better than it sitting in a drawer”

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I had the same problem trading in an iPad to Apple and then exactly the same with musicmagie - except with me they both adjusted their offers to exactly £0.

These places are all being real picky with screens these days.

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To be fair to Meelie they returned my phone very quickly. Still seems a very shifty way of operating though.

Took it into Cex this morning and £159 into the bank by the afternoon. No mention of any screen burn!

Thanks for the advice :+1::+1:

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