Phones installed with Flappy Bird selling on eBay after game pulled from stores

Less than a day after the app was pulled from stores by its developer, phones installed with mobile game phenomenon Flappy Bird are cropping up on eBay with exorbitant price tags, ranging everywhere from $300 to over $90,000 for the minimum bid.

A majority of the phones listed are Apple's iPhone 5 or 5S in various colors and span a number of providers, including AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. Most — like this gold iPhone 5s with a minimum price of $999 — have only one bid, although some listed at higher prices have more than 60 bids apiece. An auction with one of the highest dollar amounts — $99,990 — for a gray iPhone 5S has 74 bids at the time of writing. Currently, none of these prices or bids have been verified.

A small number of eBay users are also auctioning off the Flappy Bird game file, which the sellers reportedly ripped from the respective mobile game stores. One user is selling the iOS version of the game at a $50 "buy it now" price.

The first listings for phones installed with Flappy Bird began to appear just hours after developer Dong Nguyen pulled the game off Google Play and the iTunes App Store. The media storm surrounding the recent popularity rise of Flappy Bird – which first launched backed in Sept. 2013 — was an unwanted side effect of the game's success, Nguyen said, although he tweeted that he will continue to make new games.

"I am sorry Flappy Bird users, 22 hours from now, I will take Flappy Bird down," he tweeted. "I cannot take this anymore.

"It is not anything related to legal issues. I just cannot keep it anymore."