How broken phones made me millions

1 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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0:53

Dan Novaes recounts an early entrepreneurial scheme buying deactivated/CDMA BlackBerry phones cheaply on eBay (about $30–$40 each), unlocking them for use on international carriers, and reselling them for roughly $150–$200 — yielding about $100 profit per phone. He says the venture scaled through high school to "a couple million a year." The video mixes a short technical explanation (Sprint/Verizon used CDMA without SIM cards, making devices unusable domestically when service stopped but usable abroad when unlocked) with practical selling and arbitrage details.

Questions this video answers

About $30–$40 each.

About $150–$200 each.

About $100 per phone.

"A couple million a year."

Sprint and Verizon on CDMA networks (phones lacked SIM cards).

Chapters

I started like buying like things like cell phones. And here in the US at the time you could buy like the BlackBerry that was like the hot phone before iPhone and stuff. And Sprint and Verizon operated on the network that was CDMA based, which means that it didn't have a SIM card. So if you didn't pay the bill of that, they basically just break your phone. It just turns into a paperweight. But when the moment that you take that phone international, it basically unlocks. And so you could use it on like any carrier overseas. So what I would do is I'd buy them on ebay for like literally 30 or 40 bucks because it's literally a paperweight. All you could use, of course, like, you know, the services in it. And then I would unlock them and selling for like 150, 200 bucks. I was making 100 bucks a phone. So by the time I was like in high school, graduating high school was like 18, 19, like the business was doing a couple million a year. And it was kind of like doing drop shipping before, like all the courses on drop shipping and all this stuff. And it was always about the currency arbitrage and just being able to sell these items at higher prices. If you want to get more of this, follow us and get all of our hacks for free.