It was meant to be a good Christmas bargain, but the refurbished iPhone one Amazon customer bought turned out to be a hot product.

According to Gizmodo, Ben Dreyfuss bought his mom a refurbished iPhone for Christmas from Amazon with the best intentions of giving her something cool and high tech. Well, when it came to activating the device through Verizon, she was told that the phone was in actual fact stolen.

Amazon sold me a stolen iPhone to give my mother on Christmas…

 

Amazon offer refurbished deals on a number of products, a bit like Apple do via their website when they want to get rid of old stock. The only problem is that this time round, the products were on a 'wanted list', and customers had no idea they were buying stolen goods, nor did Amazon for that matter.

While this is one such incident that likely happens to very few customers, online retail is not always 100% satisfaction guaranteed. Even i've had my own orders stolen from me before they even reached the destination (although in this case Ben received his order). Let's hope Amazon can get round to solving this puzzle so that customers don't end up with a criminal record...(to be fair, they won't, but someone's going to be left with a red face at the warehouse.)