If there seems to be one universal law of commerce, it is this: If you purchase an iPhone from a strange man in the back of a Burger King parking lot who you initially contacted through Craigslist, it is a fact that there will be anything except an iPhone in the box he sells you.
This is a law of commerce more nitwits should probably internalize, since yet another poor sucker has fallen for this classic ploy, with one important difference: It was a McDonald’s! Dum dum DUM!
A 21-year-old woman from Brisbane, Australia, was scammed out of $1,500 AUD (or about $1,335 American) when she put an ad up saying she wanted to buy two unlocked iPhones on Australian online classified site Gumtree, which is essentially the Down Under version of Craigslist.
Not long after, another woman called and said she had two iPhones to sell. What a wonderful coincidence! They quickly agreed to meet up at a local McDonald’s to conduct the exchange, and the first woman was so delighted with the two iPhones being sold to her that she apparently didn’t even bother to open the box. After all, they were shrink-wrapped and looked new. How can you fake that?
But fake it someone had. In fact, she was scammed. When she opened up the boxes, she found two apples rolling around inside instead of iPhones. Not Apple computers, or Apple devices. Apples. The fruit.
There’s no real lesson here, frankly. If you’re dumb enough to fall for a “too good to be true” deal, or buy something from someone in a fast food restaurant parking lot without actually looking inside the box, that’s a Darwinian deficiency. Caveat emptor!
Source: Herald Sun
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
4 responses to “Woman Mistakenly Buys $1,300 Worth Of Apples Instead Of iPhones”
Well. That is what you get for going for Craigslist scams. Should have went for the source.
Gumtree isn’t just australian. We have it in the UK too.
There IS a lesson here. If you’re going to buy something from someone directly that you met off Craigslist, and they hand you a box, before you give them the money, OPEN THE STUPID BOX.
I worked at Wal-Mart at the return desk for a few years. I saw it all. My coworkers would say “You don’t need to check every box.” After about 4 days, I discovered this not to be true. In the two most memorable instances:
1. Guy tries to return a 27″ CRT TV (this was back in 2000-ish). He started getting really nervous when I break out the box-cutter. Tries to distract me so I won’t open it. What do I find? A box, half filled with gravel, tightly packed so it wouldn’t make noise unless you really moved it around. Return not accepted, obviously.
2. Guy tries to return a phone. Normal phone. Wall phone. Problem? The receipt was from a $250 cordless phone, with 4 handsets. Fully featured. The box was from a $99 phone. The phone inside was one of those cheap-ass $10 phones you could get anywhere, that looked like it’s been used heavily since 1970. I said no sale. He demanded to speak to the manager who, of course, let him have a full refund of $250. :| My lesson was learned, his scam was affirmed.
In 1999 I bought what I thought was a wireless keyboard from Micro Center. I opened up the shrink wrapped box and there was an old, corded Wang keyboard from the 80’s inside.
I brought it back to the store and got a refund. When I got back home, I had a voice message from the security guy from the store that cussed me out up and down accusing me of fraud and blacklisted me from the store. I gave the message to the store manager and the security guy was fired.
So how did I end up with a shrink wrapped keyboard from the 80’s? Inside job? Did a previous person return it and the employee didn’t check to see what was in the box? The box was shrink wrapped so if it was previously open the store wrapped it again.
Works both ways.