A Facebook netizen said her relatives have fallen prey to a scam involving a fake iPhone they thought they were lucky enough to have “found” in the back seat of a taxi.
Writing in a Facebook group, the netizen said two of her elderly relatives flagged a taxi to To Kwa Wan from Hung Hom last Wednesday. When they got on, they noticed what appeared to be an iPhone, and notified the taxi driver.
The driver said the phone might have been left behind by a young woman. As he browsed the phone, he said that the device is new with nothing saved on it, and that it would be near impossible to locate the owner.
He then asked the netizen’s relatives whether they would be interested in keeping the phone and giving him HK$900 (US$115) in exchange for it. Not occurring to them that the phone might be fake, and believing that they had chanced upon a serendipitous find, her relatives agreed.
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Later, the netizen helped her relatives check the phone and ascertained that it is a dummy model. Photos she attached to the post showed the phone with Apple’s signature icons on its home screen, but running on an Android interface.
“It probably costs just a few hundred dollars on Taobao,” she wrote.
While fake electronic devices on buy-and-sell platforms are not unheard of in Hong Kong, this appears to be the first report of somebody being swindled by a taxi driver over a counterfeit phone. Netizens, however, were not quite sympathetic. “If [your relatives] weren’t greedy, nothing would have happened,” one person commented.
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