“Beijing Morning News reports that local ticket scalpers have found a new way to make money on Apple: booking up all available Genius Bar appointments and then offering them for sale online,” Ben Lovejoy reports for 9to5Mac.
The scalpers “use a bunch of email addresses to make the appointments then advertise them online,” Lovejoy reports. “Appointments sell for 10- yuan ($1.60-6.40) in a country where the average monthly salary is equivalent to $580.”
Lovejoy reports, “A Beijing Morning News reporter found there were no appointments available on the Apple site for iPhone, iPad or iPod. They contacted one of the advertisers asking for an appointment the next day and were offered a choice of two local stores and two time slots.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
They should just ask for a serial number of the device that will be brought in
Beat me to it. So obvious!
I was thinking non-transferrable, but serial is good – maybe both.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
I just read yesterday that restaurants are starting to have the same problem with bots taking up all their reservations.
Humans mess everything up.
GOOD GOD that is horrible
Yup. Read about a guy who just wanted to reserve a table at a nice restaurant for he and his wife’s anniversary, but all the reservations on OpenTable were being filled while he was still asleep.
Luckily for him, he’s a programmer, so he created a bot that reserved a table for him. It happened at 4AM. Basically, he had to create a bot to beat the bots.
There are some things that just can’t be bot.
Is this the same as botulism?
If there is a hole, they will find it.
Bot hole?
It is so dirt easy for Apple to kill off this latest China SCAM, I can’t imagine it lasting another week.
I received an email from Nigeria claiming they can fix this; all Apple has to do is provide their bank account number.
To be expected when you have a Billion people looking for something to do…
Wow.. The doucheiness of scalpers knows no bounds.
-jcr
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Couple billion bright people looking for a way to make a buck. We haven’t even seen weird yet.
I will be so happy when the day comes when Apple and other western companies decide they are tired of the BS and won’t play ball in China anymore. I would love for all of them to pack up shop and leave. To me doing business in China and similar countries seem like more headaches than they are worth.
All China has to do is declare embargo against US exports. The Great Depression of 2008 is nothing compared to the economic calamity that would befall the US. Some 90% of all consumer goods on the American market is manufactured in China. On the opposite end of this equation, US represents just about 30% of Chinese exports, with the rest of the world representing the rest. A 30% cut in export revenue would severely hit Chinese economy, but with a single-party dictatorship in place, it is nothing that the government, with full control of a powerful military, couldn’t handle.
No other country depends on China so much for the day-to-day life as America.
Microsoft stores remain unaffected!!