Then the person returns the box for a refund. But the prevailing theory begins with a scam artist buying an iPad, replacing it with something of similar size and weight and then repackaging the box so it looks ready for the sales floor once again. So how is this fraud happening? Retail chains aren’t saying. “I took out the charger and then tried to plug it in the iPad, and that is when I started to notice everything.”
“When I got home and opened the box, I thought it was a real iPad,” Jamie Frick told the Newark Star-Ledger. In January, a woman in Randolph, New Jersey, said that she, too, wound up with a fake Apple tablet after shopping at her neighborhood Walmart. Last November, a man in Miami accidentally gave his wife a fake iPad for her birthday, thinking he’d spent $480 on the real deal. That same year in Vancouver, British Columbia, several iPad shoppers at Future Shop and Best Buy stores said they opened the Apple packaging to find plastic bags filled with modeling clay. “An employee says, ‘Oh it’s wrapped up, we’ll stick it back in inventory,’ and it gets sold to somebody else. “I think that probably somebody switched (the iPad) and took it back with the cellophane and everything,” Lemal told CNN in a recent interview. Like Nassise, Lemal’s iPad was packaged in a way that suggested he was buying a product straight from the manufacturer. The next year, Ken Lemal told a similar story after the businessman purchased what he thought was an iPad from a Walmart in Woodstock, Georgia. The store said the same thing had happened to five or six other people, he told his local NBC station, WHDH. In December 2010, the year the first iPad hit shelves, a man in Dorchester, Massachusetts, said he spent $800 at a local Best Buy on an iPad that turned out to be fake. The majority of news reports on the problem have involved iPad purchases at Walmart, although other retailers are not immune. To make matters worse, some stores have refused to give refunds on the grounds that the buyers might have been trying to scam them.
Numerous shoppers have purchased what they thought were iPads, only to open the box and find a worthless decoy inside. If her story sounds familiar, it’s because it has happened at retailers in a variety of states over the past few years. “When I realized it, I was upset,” she told WCVB.
Susan Nassise paid $499 for an iPad at a Walmart in Brockton, Massachusetts, only to open the box and find a plastic fake.
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