The website failed, went to an error page, and then charged my credit card the wrong amount of $64.70. I received a confirmation email saying I’ll receive a confirmation when my order has been shipped, but I haven’t provided a shipping address or paid the full $499 price tag. It is the worst experience I’ve ever faced buying a consumer electronic product and I have no idea whether or how I’ll receive the phone.
I look forward to learning more about how terrible these phones turn out.
Plot twist: there are no phones, the whole thing is a scheme to rip off people for $64.70. Enough money to make the scam worth it, not enough for people to put in the time and effort to reclaim their money unless their credit card will compensate them.
I mean, it’s literally just a rebranded CP12, it’s a $50 phone that’s been painted gold.
There’s a very high probability that the company will shut down before they even get a working product. All the pre-order money will have been spent on “research” and “salaries”, with 80% going directly into Trump’s pockets. And there will be fuck all anyone can do to get their money back. Scammers gonna scam.
I bet the business address is that same as the one for his Trump watches, gold sneakers, and some “male enhancement honey” that you’d have to be very
hard upwell, desperate to try.I sometimes wish I had no moral code. This demographic is super easy to scam. Like the guy who listed the non-woke beer or the people who listed the freedumb phone, etc. Just attach some bullshit marketing to a thing and stupid people eat it up.
OP sounds like this is a B2B gone wrong… the 67.47$ is what they pay the factory. For the consumer this should be 499$
I’m confident it’s simply going to be a white label of some Chinese brand. Only question is which one.
Also there are tons of similar mvno networks, so that part is fine.
Daily reminder, Jimmy Carter willingly sold his peanut farm because his morality told him of his own viewpoints that it may be seen as unfair for a President to own business interests while serving the most important role of government. Which in his mind may come off as corrupt.
We now have a president who see’s his name as a brand. That’s where we’ve gone.
People are forgetting too that this is just a job that he can be fired from. The SCOTUS and Republicans can fire him at any moment, but they aren’t. These middle managers suck.
They’re complicit. You don’t fire a boss because some people don’t like them, you fire a boss when you don’t like them.
What a state of affairs we’re in…
middle managers suck.
FTFY
Who’s going to sit in 15 hours worth of meetings each week if not the middle managers?
Daily reminder, Jimmy Carter willingly sold his peanut farm because his morality told him of his own viewpoints that it may be seen as unfair for a President to own business interests while serving the most important role of government. Which in his mind may come off as corrupt.
Well, that and he was complying with the Emoluments Clause. You know, that thing that should’ve seen Trump impeached on Inauguration Day – 2017, not even just 2025!
It’s much worse than that, he’s actively exploiting his position in government for personal gain. They have a gold Trump credit card that advertises that it’s “an official website of the US government”.
Worse than that, he’s hosting $1M a plate dinners for “access” and attendees get things like pardons for their family members or government approval of business deals after paying these bribes.
Land of the free!*
* but only if you’re rich enough
and that’s why president carter was the last great and decent president the us has had.
And it would just be Jimmy’s Peanuts in the end. Nothing more, nothing less. Opposed to this cheap gold platted shit Trump keeps trying to sell…
Fun fact, the alt right released a “Freedom Phone” after the jan 6 insurrection at the US capitol.
Spoilers: The phone was just brought from some no-brand Chinese company and then rebranded and sold for more. The “Freedom” is just called sideloading, which a Google Android phone could already do. And the CEO claim to have “build the OS” all by himself…
Like… some rich Millionaire trust fund kid with zero experience writing an entire android fork all by himself? 🤔
Its probably just spyware so the far right can monitor their cult followers. Once their leaders get into power, they’ll just get purged like the brownshirts.
Very plausibly what started as a FBI monitoring tool which no longer has any staff with knowledge of the program anymore.
I look forward to learning more about how terrible these phones turn out.
It will be a bog standard white label china phone with android, a custom wallpaper and maybe some cover/protector like you can get on temu. It’s not like they develop their own hardware configuration, apps or phone os.
But the world’s best professional bullshitter wrote on Truth that it’s built in the USA, it’s not a China phone
Which American companies actually manufacture displays, ram, CPUs, batteries etc. for cellphones in America?
Trumps companies if you believe him and disregard the ‘made in china’ sticker
Lol, did whoever set to the shop configure it in Australian dollars? 100 AUD are just about 65 USD. Given the currency fluctuation, that could just about work out.
Even as a ‘lets see what this grift is all about’…why the hell would anyone order this horseshit…beyond stupid.
Youtubers going for content.
Conceptually, it’ll make one f of a collectors item one day there’s no way enough will sell to make them common.
In much the same way that Confederate memorabilia is collectable.
As in, “You should avoid anyone who collects this shit. They’re probably a white nationalist.”
Or you can spray paint your old iPhone with gold coloring, slap a Trump logo on it and sell it on ebay to some unsuspecting MAGA fan for $2,000.
It’s not hard to copy Trump’s signature … you could throw that on the phone and charge $5,000 and tell everyone that you bought it at a MAGA rally where Trump signed it in 2024.
If they can grift … we can all grift harder
He did gut any dept of gov that would go after grifters or hold them accountable.
Something tells me that won’t stop someone from getting in trouble for misusing his name. Straight to deportation with you!
Sounds like an easy way out of this hell hole.
As much of a hell hole as this country is and will become, there are other levels to hell that are worse.
In that case, someone should come out with a quality phone and just slap Trump logos all over the damned thing and charge $2,000 for a $500 phone. Run the business until someone tells you to stop.
Sell Trump crap … it’s all crap anyway … make money on it if people are dumb enough to pay for this shit.
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Not where I was going for that, more like museum pieces. He’s really done a bunch of shit we absolutely should NOT have allowed. A president, releasing a phone, while in office for a grift. Our great grandkids (hopefully) will be walking through the Smithsonian going what the FUCK was going on in the 20’s, and one of these e-waste POS will be sitting there staring back at them.
Yeah, I guarantee the people who collect it will also have a sizeable collection of nazi memorabilia too.
“I just find the civil war fascinating.”
Def seems to be a crossover between the two.
And claim they’re just history buffs
IDK about that, the Saudis have like a million units sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
…because the author is an investigative journalist?
We all know it’s a scam, but it’s their job is to prove it. To prove it you have to (attempt to) buy it.
I agree any actual people trying to buy it are morons.
It seems a lot of people have forgotten that proper journalism is more than repeating what someone tweets
To rip it apart on a software and hardware level to find the backdoors and spyware. We need to know how hardcore we are being spied on when the guy near us has one.
Most low cost phone resellers have no idea what software is even running on their phones. They just compile some samples from the manufacturers SDK, slap their own logo on top and ship it.
I’m positively surprised it’s supposed to come out with android 15. Barely one major version behind.
Journalism budget.
This person buying it might convince persuade others to not to buy it.
Journalism doing things the right way would try this out. You investigate one thing, learn about another, and inform.
Well hopefully he does a charge back on his card if he’s smart. I wouldn’t give his ass a dime.
For the same reason they put bandages on their ears: they’re fucking morons.
extremely non-zero chance the entire site and payment system was coded by morons with chatgpt
The preferred term is “vibe coding” nowadays!
Consider sharing that with !vibecoders@lemmy.ca. I’m sure they will appreciate it.
At this point, his sons are just vibe scamming. Kind of surprised that they haven’t started a gun company yet. Truth rifles that literally blow up in his followers’ faces.
vibe coding sound way too cool for what it is
well i’m definitely shocked that the guy banned from operating a charity in new york because he scammed children with cancer would operate a shoddy business.
Usually he’s not even involved in running the business, they’re licensing deals where some scammer pays a few million up front to use the Trump name, which is then used to scam his followers.
Psst… you’re sarcasm is showing
Bumblebee tuna
Unfortunately true. Worth reading that snopes article just to see how much fucked up stuff was actually happening though. It’s not a mischaracterization to say they stole from kids with cancer through self dealing.
With a track record like that, he’s the first person I would trust. /s
Clearly the wrong price; should be going for $86.47.
For those OOTL (like I was):
https://time.com/7285796/james-comey-86-47-trump-threat-investigation-instagram-post-fbi/
I don’t get it
Americans say “86 [thing]” to mean “get rid of [thing]”
86 is a term used in restaurants to tell the staff when a product is no longer available. 47 means the 47th president of the US
Let me guess. It’s a rebranded Chinese phone that typically goes for like 50 bucks?
Yep, apparently it’s a cosmetically tweaked Wingtech REVVL 7 Pro 5G, which goes for $170 under the T-Mobile brand on Amazon.
Eric Trump admitted it was going to be made in China, so the press release’s description, “designed and built in the United States,” is just a lie, or actually two lies.
‘Eventually’: Eric Trump admits new mobile phone isn’t being made in the USA
But it’s golden and has a convicted felon’s name on it. That should make up for the rest of the value right?
He saw the Escobar phone and thought it was a good plan.
There’s a disposable vape with that name.
The Escobar Phone is a weird name for a vape
I think they’re called elfbars or something?
Only if the value goes so far below zero that you get an integer overflow.
Well, of course! How else would it sell in this day and age?
cosmetically tweaked
It would have to be super tweaked considering the phone you referenced has four cameras, and a notch style front camera.
My bet is that this is a 10 second photoshop job and the actual phone will look nothing like that.
I mean if you do a difference blend of two of the cameras, you get a perfectly black circle (minus some blending at the edges):
.This means that the cameras are exact pixel-perfect copies of each other arranged in that order by photoshop. They don’t exist on any phone.
Yes, I wouldn’t assume the picture has anything to do with the phone (if any) people will actually receive.
The Revvl is the cheapest phone T-Mobile offers last time I was in need of a replacement; they basically give it away free if you do 2 year contracts instead of normal month-to-month, contractless services. It’s what my dad uses. 🤣
The first thing that stood out to me is that the T from the phone logo in the thumbnail looks suspiciously similar to the T from T-Mobile. Like, almost identical to my untrained eye.
Not quite, but relatively close.
And they’ll ironically lose the lawsuit about the lies and deception of this, the defense of which will be funded by donations from the idiots that buy this phone and receive messages every hour asking for more money for the legal defense fund.
You can even buy a refurb for about $80, which is hilarious lol
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Can’t say I feel bad for you buddy. Count yourself lucky if your cc info isn’t abused.
You are literally dealing with known felons.
It’s a 404 Media journalist, he did it on purpose to point out how stupid it is.
The US is a failed state. There’s no other way to put it.
Failing, not failed. Don’t give up! Things could get a lot worse, we’re nowhere near the bottom. They could also get better.
Pessimist: It’s all terrible.
Optimist: But it might be even more terrible tomorrow!
It’s not for lack of a better term. It’s just accurate.
well, hope this spreads quickly as a lesson to everyone avoid that crap!
Those who buy this deserve it.
On the upside, its good to see the Fam wasting grift money on business that are doomed to fail.
