Yahoo Finance 
Man scams Apple out of $300,000
A man in the United States has allegedly scammed Apple out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, with an embarrassingly simple ploy.
Sharron Laverne Parrish Jr from Florida allegedly tricked the company out of $309,768 worth of goods in 16 different states, according to a secret service criminal complaint made against him.
Parrish is accused of racking up thousands of dollars in single transactions at various Apple stores and then acting surprised when the electronic payment with his debit card was declined.
In order to complete the purchases with his cancelled debit cards, it’s reported Parrish then used the simple ploy of asking employees to manually complete the transaction, in what’s known as a ‘forced sale’.
Parrish would argue that he did indeed have the funds available and then would pretend to call his bank for authorisation.
According to the complaint, Parrish offered Apple Store employees fake authorisation codes which the employees then used to override the original, unsuccessful purchases.
So how did Parrish know which codes would overrule his failed transactions?
The beauty of the scam is in these so-called ‘codes’, which you would think implies some kind of covert way to convey information.
But according to the US Department of Justice, the override code provided by banks is not unique - you just have to know how many digits the code comprises of.
"It does not actually matter what code the merchant types into the terminal,” the US Attorney’s Office said in a recent statement.
"Any combination of digits will override the denial."
To prevent such a scam, Apple store staff could have simply asked to speak to the bank themselves – and in these cases would have discovered an eerie silence on the other end of the phone.
While Parrish was successful in his wire fraud scheme 42 times, seven further transactions worth $50,931.76 were attempted but aborted presumably by him in store, or by Apple employees who were in fact privy to the correct card payment procedures.
