August 22nd, 2009
Did crook lure victims with oven door disguised as plasma HDTV?
I know plasmas are becoming popular again, but I didn’t realize they were this “hot.” According to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, con artists are using fake HDTVs to lure marks in store parking lots and then robbing them. There may be nothing new about the technique—crooks have been “selling” speakers from their trucks and vans in parking lots for years—but you have to appreciate the lengths the cons go to fool their potential victims.
You’d think maybe the criminals would just steal some of those fake TVs from an Ikea and sucker people with them, but one of them was particularly desperate/inspired. He took an oven door, used aluminum foil to “trim it,” then covered it with Bubble Wrap and placed stickers on it. The goal was to make it resemble a 37-inch plasma HDTV. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t include a picture of the “set” to give us an idea just how convincing this phoney actually looked. The guy in possession of the object supposedly tried to sell it in a Wal-mart parking lot, then was arrested after the cops investigated a tip. Ironically, since just owning an over door disguised as a TV isn’t an actual crime, he was released on this technicality.
The morale, of course, is: Don’t ever buy anything in a store parking lot. Apparently, some victims still haven’t learned that lesson, since crooks wouldn’t bother faking electronic devices if there weren’t potential marks gullible enough to buy them.
Have you ever been approached by someone trying to sell you fake electronics? Let us know about the experience in our TalkBack section.
Sean Portnoy spent several years as an editor at Computer Shopper magazine, most recently serving as online executive editor. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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