With the number of people signing up for a OnePlus 2 invite quickly approaching the two million mark, some of us have gotten to the point where we’d actually pay more just to skip the line. Fortunately, OnePlus is giving its fans the opportunity to do just that by auctioning off official invites on eBay for several hundred dollars. Instead of pocketing the cash, however, OnePlus is donating all of the proceeds from these auctions to charity.
OnePlus is auctioning off invites for its new OnePlus 2 smartphone in partnership with eBay’s Giving Works Initiative, with the proceeds going to the UNICEF Tap Project, which provides clean drinking water to millions of children around the world. Explaining the decision to auction off 100 invites, OnePlus said it noticed fans were cashing in on the demand for invites by selling them on third-party sites for a hefty profit, which “wasn’t very fair to our fans in the spirit of what we’re trying to achieve“. By auctioning official invites on eBay, the company is providing an official alternate source of invites and contributing to charity at the same time. Currently, the company is auctioning 50 invites with a further 50 to be listed later today. Bids for invites -which is for the 64GB Sandstone Black variant of the OnePlus 2 – currently sit at over $500 for a single invite and given there’s been 1 million plus registrations, it’s likely to rise higher. Once an auction ends, OnePlus says users will receive an unique invite via email and then have 7 days to claim the invite and 30 days to actually purchase the handset.
