Tesco grovels after 'clay iPad' fiasco

Tesco has been forced into a grovelling apology after a customer ended up being arrested for fraud when he complained after shelling out £470 for an iPad only to find the box stuffed with clay.
Colin Marsh bought the tablet at Tesco in Whitstable as a present for his ten-year-old daughter. However, when he got home he discovered that the box contained anything but the latest tablet.
Marsh stormed back to the supermarket to demand a refund but was refused. He said: “I took it back to Tesco, but they said they couldn’t give me a refund and would need to carry out an investigation. Two days later, I got a call 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.”
Staff believed Marsh had activated the tablet in his name and staged the stunt himself. He remained on bail for almost two months until police discovered that the tablet was activated under a different name in Wales.
The father-of-two has since got his money returned to him and had his bail cancelled and no further action will be taken against him. Marsh added: “It’s absolutely disgusting.”
In a statement, Tesco said: “We would of course never knowingly have sold it to Mr Marsh and we apologise sincerely for the problems this has caused him.
“We immediately launched an internal investigation into how this happened and shared the information we gathered with the police, which we believe was the right thing to do.”
The clay iPad scam first hit the headlines in January last year. Fraudsters in Canada bought 24 of the tablets and, after removing them and filling the boxes with clay, returned them to a number of big-name stores. Taken in by the perfect resealing of the boxes, staff gave refunds to the conmen and then re-sold the boxes of clay to unsuspecting customers.