I would rather Americans be cautious and alive than classy and dead. Did you see my post where these things are showing up as weapons too?. Yeah this may be a money maker but we should follow where the money is going. When some things don't seem on the up and up and actions can't be explained I think it needs checking out. I'm really not in to being "right" Actually I hope you turn out to be. Time will tell, I guess.
Most of the people doing the buying probably have no idea what the buyer's intentions are and may think they are doing no harm since the only entity getting ripped is a big corporation. One thing they all know, even if what they do may yet not be expressly illegal, is that they are screwing somebody, even if that somebody is a corporation.
This isn't an 'innocent business.' The ones who are just selling to Joe Sixpack and not to some terrorist's middlemen are still buying a company's product, modifying it, and then selling that product as if it is new, using that company's 'good name'. If the phone malfunctions- perhaps due to the quality of the modification- the consumer may call the original manufacturer and eat up time and thus money complaining to customer service about the product, because they assume that company is responsible for it, and not the A'hole who modified it. So the manufacturer's plan of selling the product below their cost to better compete, intending to make up for the loss on the sales of minutes is short-circuited- they never get their investment back.
That's fraud- false advertisement- the end user is under the impression that it's a new Tracphone - it's labeled as such after all- but it's no longer what it is labeled. It's some generic chopped phone with some parts of unknown quality from who knows where, assembled and reprogrammed by someone who may or may not take care to do the work correctly, and sold by someone who won't be liable for the product if somehow the hijacked product becomes a centerpeice in someone's class-action lawsuit. In the right venue the legit manufacturer could still lose since the company has deep pockets and juries can be fickle.
The bogus cell phone company doing the selling is mooching off another company, "making" a product which he evades having to comply with all the regulations that the real original manufacturer did- he gets all the benefit of being a phone "manufacturer" with none of the risks, none of the licensing and other government fees, and few of the costs of assembly workers and component parts.
It is annoying that phone companies, printer companies and others engage in below-cost sales incentives where the loss is recovered by tacking it onto refill minutes or the cartridges, etc - at least you can still assume the product was made according to that company's standards and reputation, and use that reputation to assess which product will be the better one. You know if there's a problem they will deal with it with you because they need to uphold their reputation. But what I hate more than those enticing below-cost sales tactics are people who take advantage of another's hard work, who know what the deal is and then renege on it. Modifying the product to bypass the deal- the agreement to buy airtime implicit in that it's a product designed to work on one network- is reneging on the deal. It's fraud. It's unethical yet they are proud enough to defend it.
In addition, a company that has a good reputation for workmanship is going to be harmed when people modify their products and then sell them under that same name, using the good reputation of the makers to profit at the legal manufacturer's expense. The altered product may fail and make people reluctant to legitimately purchase other things the original manufacturer makes, or tell others that his name-brand phone or other product was defective, and can unjustly ruin the company's reputation.
(Not that having your product be preferred by four out of five professional terrorists is a desireable reputation.)