Thanks to shows like Breaking Bad, we tend to think of drug dealers as people with just, a shit ton of money who aren’t afraid to show it off. In recent years though, savvy drug dealers in the UK have taken to rocking the most retro of phones to evade the police.
While there are indeed a ton of awesome phones from yesteryear, like the legendary 3210, according to a recent VICE article, drug dealers in the UK seem oddly enamoured with its, better, buffer baby brother, the 8210. The main reason is seems to be that the 8210 has a massive, iPhone withering battery life of almost a week which means you can reliably expect it to work 99% of the time, even if you haven’t charged it in 6 days and it spent 5 of those days being used as an air hockey puck. Another reason is that, as Techdirt notes, it’s simultaneously difficult to track and easy to dispose of if its ever compromised. Also, because the phone holds almost no data other than a call log and a handful of horribly mispelled texts, it’s difficult to glean incriminating information from. Unlike modern phones which, if stolen or compromised, would give whoever did so access to everything from your bank details to all those selfies you took and didn’t share on Twitter.
8210s are so popular with the seedier members of society that in certain circles, an 8210 is as good as money and there are some people out there who’d willingly swap one for your drug of choice. Similar to how some drug dealers in the States will sell drugs in return for bottles of Tide detergent. No really.
When VICE approached a drug addict who’d dealt directly with a couple of 8210 loving drug dealers and asked him why specifically the 8210 seemed to be the one phone everyone wanted to get their hands on, he casually responded that it probably has something to do with the fact that “everyone likes a game of Snake“. Which is probably the best answer we’ve ever heard to a question and we honestly wouldn’t be mad if everyone we met answered at least one question we asked with that, even if it was “Will you marry me?“.
