What kind of person hands over $750 for two new iPhone 6s handsets from a person they’ve just met on the street?
Apparently the kind of person who’s then surprised that the bag supposedly carrying his new iPhones instead contains a large amount of sugar, that’s who!
The unnamed “victim” in this particular scam was a U.K. citizen from Manchester. He was walking through the city center yesterday afternoon when he was approached by a man offering him what he claimed were new iPhones. The would-be customer immediately agreed to withdraw £500 ($750) from a nearby cashpoint — after which the scammer disappeared, leaving the victim to discover he had been duped.
“We’d like to remind people that if a deal seems too good to be true, it usually is,” says local police inspector Phil Spurgeon. “You’re either buying a fake or stolen article, or something completely different.”
This isn’t the first time gullible members of the public have been tricked out of money for what they believe to be new Apple devices.
Last year, another Manchester resident paid £250 ($380) for what he thought to be a new iPad, but instead turned out to be a box of potatoes. More recently, a Detroit business bought several “iPhones” from a group of three Detroit-area teenagers only to discover that they were iPhone boxes filled with Play-Doh bricks instead of smartphones.
Please stop this, everybody. It’s giving Apple fans a bad name.
Source: Manchester Evening News
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
8 responses to “Scam victim finds the ‘s’ in iPhone 6s stands for ‘sugar’”
There’s a sucker born every minute…
The fact the person buying didn’t at least ask to look inside the box makes him nearly as worse as the scammer!!
Or, there’s more to the story than reported.
There are no other additional details I’ve been able to find. In a few cases like this, people have shown “customers” a working device, then switched it out before handing them the bag. You still have to be pretty gullible to be taken in by something like this, though.
And there may not be more to it but sometimes it ends up being a more elaborate scam where the “victim” is in on the whole thing.
Yea, this happens all the time. Unfortunately greed and the fact that some people by the iphone just because it’s an iphone and they want to show it off to their friends.
LoL.
If something appears too good to be true then it probably is a scam. Scam artists are very talented and pretty much sense they know who they can scam. People looking for bargains need to be extra wary because they are the perfect marks. Buying something from a person on the street puts the risks all on you. It’s not funny, but rather sad how humans deceive one another for mere cash. It is easy for a skilled scam artist to switch “packages” from a working device to a fake. It takes practice and diversion tactics. It’s better to just stay away from the situation rather than thinking you can outsmart the scam artist.