This isn't a friend. This person is a sociopath and the reason why they loaned me the phone was an ulterior motive to save their marriage after doing something horribly wrong to me and this was their way of saving face and keeping their spouse appeased because their spouse was mad at what they did to me. I really didn't want to get into all these details and make this post longer than necessary, which is why I said "nice enough to loan me" to keep from people deviating from the question and asking more about the backstory, plus it's nobody's business, but if you must know, there it is.

Somehow you and the other person ignored the whole line of "I know their personality and that they may try to take advantage if they think I don't know what it's worth" and are twisting this into me taking advantage when I explicitly said they have this type of personality, and now you're forcing me to expand a bit more on all this so others reading this will not just upvote you and answer with the same sentiment and will hopefully answer my question.

I predicted these types of responses but I had to mention some type of reason for wanting to know these prices or if I simply asked "Why do the prices differ, I want to buy this phone from someone" all the responses would be "ask them what they want for it." I'm thinking about how people will respond before they do and formatting this in a way to make it easy for everyone. Just answer the question, lets not get into all this.

It's a unique situation and would require a lot of explaining and backstory, but just know that this one single act of loaning me the phone for taking pictures on a trip was completely out of character and this person ran over a cat accidentally last week and laughed about it, just to give you an idea of who I'm dealing with. This is not a human being I am dealing with. It's a shell of a person with no soul inside. Pure evil.

I don't even want the phone but there's a whole backstory to that too so let's stick to trying to help people get their questions answered and not assume all these things based on a few sentences. I tried to keep this as vague as possible to avoid people like you popping up on here.

Wanting to know a FAIR PRICE, an ACCURATE price is not "lowballing." If I don't know this, this person will scam me. This isn't an attempt to get one over on them. It's an attempt to PROTECT myself from a person that everybody in their life, including their spouse, is terrified of (and let's not get into a whole discussion about why the spouse hasn't left. This is way too much for a simple question about prices and people trying to turn it into an ethical debate without all the details.

If the phone is worth $130 and this person ends up telling me $700 or whatever price, out of spite, I need to know. If I show any interest in buying it, they're going to not sell it because we don't like each other (and theres a whole backstory about why I need to buy it when I actually don't want to, again, more novels). So I already have to offer more than what it's worth, I just don't want to get completely price raped in the hundreds on this thing. If it's worth $130 Ill offer $200 to appeal to their more greedy side.

If it's worth $300 then I'll have to offer $370 or so. I need to know what it's worth so I know what an attractive price is to them where that greed outweighs their natural desire to be spiteful and screw me on this.

This is a tech sub, not r/AmITheAsshole so save the judgments. Giving the whole backstory turns this into exactly what I didnt want it to, people getting distracted with the backstory and not answering the question.

Yeah, I already know what youll say next, TLDR.