You know those telly ads you’re seeing a lot of at the moment, the ads that say you can send in your old phones for recycling and get them turned into cash? You probably thought, like me at the time, surely that’s a bit of a con, surely that won’t work?

Well think again.

With an impending tax bill due on January 31st, and my saving not going as well as I’d have hoped, I decided to see if I could indeed convert my old mobiles to cash.

I had two phones for exchange. A Nokia N95 8GB. In its day it was the king of mobile phones. But 2 years later this workhorse of a mobile is battered, scratched and ever so slightly unresponsive after a beer spilling incident back in June. The recycling company Mobile Phone XChange gave me the best quote for this phone. Up to £114 they said. I knew I probably wouldn’t get anywhere near that, but thought it would be worth a go none the less.

I also added a Sony Ericsson K800i in the envelope I sent back. Older, not as high spec, but certainly not as battered as the Nokia N95. Mobile Phone XChange said I’d get up to £25 for it.

3 days after sending a received an email from Mobile Phone XChange. £25 for the Sony Ericsson, and £60 for the Nokia. The reason they wouldn’t give me any more for the Nokia because, and I quote, “there was a PIN lock on it, so they couldn’t check how well it worked.” I was rather chuffed, £60 for the Nokia is more than I would have charged for it if I had been selling it on Ebay. Infact I probably wouldn’t have sold it on Ebay because it was nearly at the end of its working life. But I thought, “hmm, I wonder what would happened if I emailed them the PIN number?”

A day after emailing the PIN number they said “in that case you can have the full £114″. 3 days later the money was in my bank account.

So in total I got £139 for two phones that I still think to this day are worthless.

I can’t entirely work out how these companies are able to afford paying for all these phones, or even what they do with them. I believe that in some cases they recycle the phones and in some cases they send them to Africa.

There is one downside to all this. I’m now having sleepless nights thinking that some poor sole in Africa is using my beer soaked phone and cursing at it in the same way I did when it wouldn’t respond.