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Thursday, September 1, 2011

Tricked into buying wooden iPad


Scammers swindle $168 from US woman



If a stranger approached you in a McDonald's parking lot and offered to sell an iPad on the cheap, how would you react? For Ashley McDowell, the answer was an immediate yes.


According to the sheriff's office in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, in the US, Ms McDowell, 22, was picking up food at a McDonald's on Monday night when two men approached her in the parking lot. After showing her a new iPad, the police report said, they told Ms McDowell that they had bought the tablet computers in bulk and were reselling them for $US300 ($280) apiece.

Ms McDowell evidently jumped at the chance to snag a cut-rate iPad but explained that she had only $US180 ($170). The men decided to sell her one iPad at that price, she told police.

She handed them the money and then waited to open the FedEx box supposedly containing the iPad until she got home - where she proceeded to pull out not a shiny new Apple tablet, but a "piece of wood painted black with an Apple logo", the police report said.

The so-called "screen" is filled with mock iPad icons for email, photos and Safari - all held down with black tape. The studious conmen even included a "Best Buy sales ticket", police said.

Ms McDowell told police that the swindlers were driving "a white Impala with no rims and no tint". One of the guys, she noted, had "a gold tooth".

LA Times


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/tablets/tricked-into-buying-wooden-ipad-scammers-swindle-168-from-us-woman-20110901-1jmp7.html#ixzz1WgRcxOiQ



3 comments:

John Going Gently said...

Proves the point that there are will dumb dick heads that can be scammed
x

Sharon said...

Bait and switch is an old con and somebody said there was a sucker born every minute.

LindaG said...

Haha. I would have said no, as we did on one farm trip where some guy had been 'given' a large screen TV from his work and was willing to sell it at a good price.

And then I would have gone the other way.

Some peoples' kids. ;)