If someone with a visible gold tooth approached you in a McDonald’s Parking Lot explaining that he’d bought some iPads in bulk and wants to pass the savings on to you for $300 (but is willing to take $180 if that’s all you have), what would you do? Would you turn the other direction and run as fast as you could?
22-year-old Ashley McDowell wasn’t that wise. She paid this gold-toothed stranger $180 for a sealed FedEx box that she was told contained an iPad, and didn’t open it until she got home. As you might expect, she didn’t find an iPad in it. But what adds the extra little cachet of weirdness to this story that’s gotten it carried on various tech blogs is what she did find. Rather than the expected chunk of brick or plywood or whatever, she found a wooden iPad replica, right down to a fake Apple logo on the back.
I have no idea why the crooks went to the trouble of actually mocking up an iPad, given that they couldn’t possibly hope to fool someone who bothered to open the package on the spot. (Unless, as a friend of mine proposed, the answer is that their brains were addled by meth to where it seemed like a brilliant idea.) It’s almost more of a mystery than how anyone could have so little common sense as to be fooled into buying it sight unseen.
Regardless, this is probably one of the more expensive bits of arts and crafts the average person might find himself buying. Wonder if Ashley could recoup some of what she lost by selling it on eBay as an object d’art?
(Found via TechCrunch.)
That looks more like cardboard than wood.