- If you’re not trading in an “eligible device” OnePlus offers a flat $100 credit for old phones.
- The $100 credit is framed as a reward for recycling your old device.
- OnePlus may not be verifying recycling compliance, and some shoppers say they never got mailing labels.
When is a trade-in not a trade-in? When it comes time to upgrade to a new phone, plenty of us like to save a little money by exchanging our old phone in the process. It’s certainly a lot easier than trying to find someone to sell it to yourself, and you can sometimes discover incredible offers that feel like they’re paying you more than your old hardware is worth. If you’re shopping for a new OnePlus phone, though, you might want to pay careful attention to the details of the trade-in offers OnePlus lays out before you, because one of them is not quite what it appears to be.
When you’re shopping for a new phone like the OnePlus 12, you’ll see two similar trade-in buttons: “Trade in Eligible Device” and “Trade in ANY device in ANY condition.” The former is your traditional trade-in experience, where newer, more expensive devices are worth more money. The latter, as OnePlus explains in its FAQ, is essentially a $100 credit for recycling your old device, “a guaranteed recycling reward” — OnePlus doesn’t actually want your phone. But as we spotted some Redditors talking about in a post started by user bigshiba04, it doesn’t seem that OnePlus ever checks to see if you go through with the recycling — essentially making it a free $100 discount.