Shoppers Open iPad Boxes to Find Bags of Clay Instead

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Ian Gavan / Getty Images

Clay! It’s nature’s iPad. Drag your finger across it to create drawings, multitask by molding it into the shape of a camera or typewriter, see what your friends are up to by ripping a hole in it and peering through.

Shoppers in the Metro Vancouver area, however, would prefer actual iPads. CTV News reports that criminals are buying brand-new iPad 2’s from Best Buy, Future Shop, Walmart and London Drugs, replacing the computers with bags of modeling clay, then rewrapping the packages and returning them.

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Retailers were skeptical when people started coming in with iPad boxes full of clay to demand refunds, but they’ve changed their tune after CTV’s broadcasts about the scam. Both Best Buy and Future Shop say at least 10 stolen iPads were sold at each of their stores.

Apparently, this wasn’t an amateur operation. Scam victim Dayna Chabot told CTV:

“It was all sealed properly and everything. It was the shape of an iPad. They even had a piece of clay where the charger went and everything. Like, they knew what they were doing.”

Perhaps the thieves are simply proponents of the arts! Lay down your iPads, Canadians, and learn to sculpt like modern Michelangelos, embracing your newborn freedom from the web to study nature in all its many-splendored forms. The Internet is down today, anyway, so you’re not missing anything.

[via geek.com]

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