New Delhi: Cashify has spent years building itself into the name Indians default to when they want to sell an old phone or buy a used one without dealing with OLX strangers or sketchy local shops. The company’s now worth of ₹1,000 crore and reportedly eyeing an IPO. Somewhere in that growth story, though, a pretty loud group of customers has been trying to flag something: what you’re promised and what actually shows up at your door don’t always match.
The grading problem
Start with the grading system, because that’s where most of this seems to trace back to. Cashify sells refurbished phones under labels like Best Value, Fair, Good, and Superb and each one supposedly telling you exactly what condition to expect. Superb should mean barely-there wear. Fair means you’re accepting more visible damage in exchange for a lower price. Simple enough in theory.
But in practice, buyers keep saying the label and the phone don’t agree with each other. People who paid the premium for “Superb” are opening boxes to scratches and dents around the camera module or charging port the kind of wear that shouldn’t be on a phone marketed as close to flawless. And if you go down a tier to “Fair,” some buyers say they’ve received phones with swapped screens or replaced batteries that were never disclosed at checkout. You’d think that’s the kind of thing a listing should mention.
Battery health is its own mess. A few buyers have pointed out that the battery percentage advertised at purchase doesn’t match what shows up in the phone’s own settings once they actually check and it’s consistently the settings number that’s lower, not higher. Convenient pattern, if you’re being cynical about it. Nobody’s proven this is deliberate, but the fact that it keeps trending in one direction is the kind of thing that should probably worry a company about to face public shareholders.
Price cuts after pickup
Multiple reviews on sources describe a pattern that goes something like this: you get a quote online, it looks solid, you agree to sell. Then the pickup agent shows up, inspects the phone in person, and suddenly finds “faults” nobody mentioned before and the price drops. One reviewer said an agent tacked on extra fault points to the inspection report after the phone had already passed a check, seemingly just to justify paying less. Another described a nearly ₹30,000 quote getting knocked down by thousands, for a device the very same agent had called flawless minutes earlier. That’s not really a “condition assessment” problem at that point that’s just a bait-and-switch, if the accounts are accurate.
A recent report through consumer forums and found something like ninety separate complaints on a single platform, covering unpaid sellers, disputed warranty claims, and refurbishment gripes that have apparently been piling up for close to two years now. That’s not a handful of unlucky customers venting online. That’s a pattern with some staying power.
YouTubers join the pushback
YouTubers have picked up on it too, which tends to be where these things start actually hurting a brand. Search around and you’ll find videos with titles like “Cashify Scam Exposed” creators unboxing devices in noticeably worse shape than advertised, then walking through return processes that stalled out or got rejected outright. Once it moves from written reviews to video, with someone holding the actual scratched-up phone on camera, it’s a different kind of pressure.
What happens next
To be fair to Cashify, none of this amounts to proof of intentional fraud, and grading a used phone is genuinely subjective reasonable people can disagree on what counts as a “minor mark” versus real damage. Any company reselling thousands of secondhand devices is going to have some mismatch between what’s promised and what people expect. That’s just the nature of the business. Cashify also hasn’t issued a point-by-point response to these specific complaints, so there’s a version of events we’re not hearing.
But subjectivity doesn’t really explain a pickup agent adding fault points after a phone already passed inspection. And it doesn’t explain a battery percentage that seems to only ever drift one direction. The volume here, across grading, pricing, and refunds, at minimum points to a quality-control and communication problem right at the moment Cashify is trying to convince public investors it’s a company with its operations in order.
If you’ve bought a phone that didn’t match its listed grade, or had a quote slashed after pickup, you’re not without options. Consumer grievance portals exist for exactly this. And if an agent shows up and tries to renegotiate the price on the spot, you’re allowed to just say no and walk away from the deal before it’s finalized.
