GrayMarketSquealer
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Man beaten, robbed of $95,000 worth of iPhones outside Apple Store
It hasn’t been mentioned here but there has been a long history of Apple retail stores supplying various gray and black markets, money laundering organizations, and just about any warm body desirous of buying iPhones for resale.
New stories post regularly about the criminals involved. https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2022/07/29/eight-indicted-money-laundering-ring
Most of these buyers request no name no email printed receipts for their own records so that the purchases are untraceable to anybody.
These resellers all know each other, competing daily in stores to clean out the stores’ of most popular iPhone products for their customers on any given day. They see each other’s faces and “team” members and figure out who are the ones with the biggest credit cards, gift cards, and even Apple Pay on their iPhones. Known big buyers can be seen and easily followed upon leaving the store with such large caches of iPhones and then mugged and robbed of the known high value of what they are known to be carrying.These gangs/groups are extremely organized and provided with “sniping” buying tools for the Apple website to place multiple orders in minutes.I highly suspect that they have either insiders or paid informers at the shipping services because they will often know, before the store opens, when the shipments are delivered and posted to inventory. You’ve seen the delivery hijacking stories too. $300k was stolen directly from a FedEx truck in San Francisco at the delivery entrance a couple of years ago.
The internal nomenclature reference to these customers has evolved over the years. Variously they are “hobbyists”, “our volume friends”, “bonus bumpers”, etc. At one point I had it explained to me that if they refused to sell to a known reseller, they would be accused of discrimination because the largest percentage are of specific ethnic descents. Most recently, they are officially “non end-user” customers and, while still generally limited to two iPhones per transaction, they are recently no longer required to return to the back of the line of customers waiting to buy. They are now “officially” allowed to purchase until the store inventory is gone. What are the legitimate end users to do? This activity is a significant contribution to the lack of availability to true Apple customers.
This policy was copied and pasted from the Apple website just now:“Consumers Only
The Apple Store sells and ships products to end-user customers only, and we reserve the right to refuse or cancel your order if we suspect you are purchasing products for resale.”
It is clear in each retail store that Apple is violating its own stated policy.
New Hampshire has also long been a favorite of the resellers because there is no sales tax.
I could go in but suffice it to say, Apple speaks out of both sides of its “policy”.
