From 2010 to 2013, I worked at an Apple Retail store in the East Bay of California and handled phone repairs for the latter two. The amount of fraud was ridicu

From 2010 to 2013, I worked at an Apple Retail store in the East Bay of California and handled phone repairs for the latter two. The amount of fraud was ridiculous. We would get at least a dozen attempts at replacing phones (and sometimes laptops) that were clearly tampered with. You would have people coming in with up to four appointments at a time, each time with a phone that had the same issue -- it wouldn't power on. Why? Because they short circuited the logic board on purpose. If we rejected a claim for tampering, they would pretty much go right out the store and (this is what one of the loss prevention people told me at the time) someone would swap out the internal serial number sticker for one that was more likely to be not blacklisted, and try again at another store in the region the next day. This happened every single day I worked there. I vividly remember one extra aggressive person trying to bully us into a replacement for half an hour after the store had already closed who had already been refused on six separate occasions from different stores in the market. This fraud doesn't just happen in China, it's everywhere.