Tampa man charged with scamming $309,768 from Apple retail stores

July 30, 2014

Sharron Laverne Parrish Jr. of Tampa has been charged with scamming a total of $309,768 from a number of Apple's retail stores located in 16 states, according to recently revealed federal court documents.

The 24 year old Parrish Jr is accused of taking that massive amount from Apple, in the form of merchandise, via a rather complicated scheme. He took a debit card that he knew had no funds in its associated account to these targeted Apple stores in order to "buy" devices. When the debit card was declined, he protested that there was some mistake, which then lead to many of the Apple store employees to call the bank. If there are in fact funds in the account, the bank can send an override code that can be entered into a debit card reader manually to allow the transaction to take place.

However, in this case, Parrish pretended to chat with the bank after an Apple employee handed him the phone, and Parrish in turn allegedly gave the worker a false code to override the bank's decline order on the debit card. Here's the key to his scam; it didn't matter what the actual code is He gave the Apple store employees any number to type in, as long as its within a specific number of digits, and it can still override the machine.

The scam was discovered by the U.S. Secret Service and Parrish was arrested on July 17. An Apple spokesperson declined to say if the company plans to make any changes at its retail stores so that this kind of scam cannot happen again.

Source: Tampa Bay Times