What you need to know
- A UK man has been duped into paying £500 for two bottles of lemonade.
- Two men approached him on the street, offering him an Apple MacBook and an iPhone 11 Pro.
- He is the second person to fall for the scam in two weeks.
A second man in the UK has been swindled into paying £500 for what he thought was a MacBook and an iPhone 11 Pro that in fact turned out to be lemonade.
As reported by Birmingham Live:
A second man has been duped after paying hundreds of pounds for two bottles of fizzy pop and a laptop bag – instead of an Apple Mac and iPhone 11 Pro.Dylan Obeegadoo told Black Country Live that two fraudsters, James and Frankie, approached him in an Churchill Shopping Centre in Dudley on Thursday, March 5, and offered the expensive products.After examining the two electrical items, which were real, he handed to the cash machine to withdraw £500 and met the duo outside their car.But the Dylan said the con artists managed to switch the bags during a convincing scam and said he was left with two bottles of fizzy pop and a cardboard box.
The news is a carbon copy of an incident two weeks ago, in which student Dre Twenti was offered the chance to buy a MacBook and 3 iPhones for £1200. In both instances, the men were shown real electronics and convinced to hand over a large amount of cash. It wasn't until it was too late that Obeegadoo realized the goods had been swapped for two bottles of lemonade and cardboard box.
Obeegadoo said:
"Frankie invited me in his car and showed me a real iPhones11 Pro and Apple Mac he bought. He told me he cannot pay back the credit card and has to sell them."I checked the items and he put them in a laptop bag. We agreed £500 for iPhone 11 Pro and Macbook. We exchanged numbers and we went to the bank and withdrew the cash. "When I returned to his car, I checked the items one more time and agreed to give him the money."They then moved their car, an old bright-blue Ford, two metres forward and gave me a duplicate laptop bag."I realised the scam when I reached home. There was two bottles of fizzy drinks and a piece of paper packaging in the laptop bag."The case was reported to Dudley council and Police. But they both said they can't do anything about it."
The last scam sounded a bit far fetched, but two reports in two weeks shows that clearly this trick is working on unsuspecting members of the public. So as we told you last week, if you're thinking about buying a new Apple device, don't buy it from a stranger in the street. And remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
