Ever purchased an iPhone directly from the Apple Store Online? You’ll know how seamless the whole process is, from ordering on Safari to the delivery at your door. Well, one customer in the UK expected the same excellent service but instead received a fake iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Reddit user u/theEdmard ordered a 256GB iPhone 15 Pro Max in Natural Titanium from Apple’s UK website, but as soon as they opened the package from DPD, they “immediately knew it wasn’t right.”
The smartphone inside the box of the exact iPhone they had ordered looked suspiciously different from the iPhone you see when browsing the Apple Store. The fake iPhone had a chin at the bottom of the device and definitely wasn’t using an OLED display.
“Once I turned it on, I was greeted with a very poor setup process, and I immediately clocked that it was an Android device in a skin.”
“I managed to skip all the setup screens and get into the phone. It has Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok installed already. The OS is glitchy and horrible, and the camera is like a slideshow that crashes if you try to use any UI element on the screen.”
u/theEdmard has opened a ticket with Apple Support and is waiting to hear about the next steps to determine at what point the iPhone purchased directly from Apple was tampered with. They also own AtWrk, a company that works on software solutions for businesses, one of which is a fraud prevention platform that is already on this peculiar case.
Be wary of fake iPhones — iMore’s take
This is an extremely bizarre situation, but you’d have to presume that something has happened between the iPhone leaving Apple’s warehouses and arriving at the customer’s front door.
iPhone theft is rife, and with delivery companies, there is always a possibility that, at some point, someone tampers with a package along the way, especially with an expensive product like an iPhone.
Luckily, when purchasing from a large retailer, they will likely have insurance in place with the delivery company and replace tampered goods. DPD has assured the customer in question here that the package had not been tampered with, and that opens up a whole load of questions as to where the fake iPhone initially came from.
As someone who purchases from Apple frequently, I have little doubt that this issue will be resolved and the customer will receive a genuine iPhone 15 Pro Max, but we’ll have to monitor this story and hope that this is a one-off circumstance rather than a continuous issue that we all have to stay wary of.
