A 24 year old managed to scam the fruity cargo cult Apple more than 42 times – at least in Florida.
The Tampa Bay Times said that Sharron Laverne Parrish tricked Apple Store employees in 16 states starting around December 2012 into accepting fake authorisation codes to buy $309,768 worth of Apple goods.
He was arrested by the US Secret Service special agents working alongside Apple and Chase Bank security. US spooks often get involved in cases involving currency scams.
Parrish visited Apple Stores and tried to buy products with four different debit cards, which were all closed by the banks. When his debit card was inevitably declined by the Apple Store, he would protest and offer to call his bank.
He did not call the bank, of course. He would just give the Apple Store employees a fake authorisation code with a certain number of digits, which is normally provided by credit card issuers to create a record of the credit or debit override.
What Parrish had worked out was that as long as the number of digits is correct, the override code itself does not matter.
However because Apple employees overrode the initial declination against the instructions of Chase Bank, Apple suffered the loss because of this fraud.
