Ashley McDowell, 22, thought she had picked up the bargain of the century when she took home a shiny new iPad 2 for US$180 (B5,400).
Unfortunately there were three small problems – it wasn’t all that shiny, it certainly wasn’t new and, perhaps most irritating of all, it wasn’t an iPad 2.
in fact, what Ms McDowell had shelled out an awful lot of money for was a worthless plank of wood.
It all started when she was approached by two men in a McDonald’s car park in Spartanburg, South Carolina, who claimed to have bought some cutting-edge Apple tablets at a knock-down price.
For most people, alarm bells would have been ringing. Apparently not the case for Ms McDowell.
The men showed her a brand new iPad as a show of good faith – because that’s the kind of honest guys they are – and even knocked US$120 (B3,600) off the original price they quoted her of US$300 (B9,000), well below the listed price for the gadget.
The two men then apparently carried a Fed-Ex box to her car and she handed over her money without checking its contents.
When she returned home, she discovered she had actually bought a very expensive, but now utterly worthless, piece of wood, with an Apple logo on the back.
You have to admire the effort put into the disguise though – it was also framed with black tape and had pasted onto its face icons for Apple’s web browser Safari, an email inbox and an iPhoto icon.
The duo even mocked up a fake Best Buy receipt for the iPad.
– Photo by Spartanburg Sheriff’s Office