14 DAY TRIAL // This one’s for the books. A 47-year-old father of two ended up jailed after he had the nerve to return a fake iPad purchased at Tesco.
Colin Marsh reportedly wanted to buy the tablet for his 10-year-old daughter, Maddie. When he got home with the goods, he discovered that the box contained a lump of dry clay. Furious, Marsh went back to Tesco and demanded a refund.
He recounts his story for Metro, as follows.
“‘I took [the iPad] back to Tesco, but they said they couldn’t give me a refund and would need to carry out an investigation,’ he said. ‘Two days later, I got a call at about 8pm from the police asking if I could come down to the station to answer some questions. I just thought they wanted to know what had happened, but the next thing I know I’m being bundled into a cell.’”
Marsh, who’s been running his own successful businesses for 22 years and owns a house, says it’s preposterous for the store to think he’d do something like that.
“Why would I want to scam Tesco out of a £470 iPad?” he said.
Marsh was reportedly held for no longer than three hours, but it was enough to make him change his mind about the store and local authorities.
“You just can’t treat people like that. It’s absolutely disgusting,” he said.
The store apologized to Mr. Marsh and said it was “disappointed” to learn that its products had been tampered with.
A company spokesman said, “We would of course never knowingly have sold it to Mr Marsh and we apologise sincerely for the problems this has caused him.”
Editor’s note This isn’t the first time someone buys a lump of clay posing for an iPad, but jailing a man for trying to make justice for his family is simply ridiculous.