By Sydney Barragan, Los Angeles Daily News The Tribune Content Agency
A Los Angeles woman and a Yorba Linda man say laptops they recently ordered and expected to pick up at an Apple store in Glendale were stolen before they could arrive to claim them.
Their stories come after two other Southern California residents reported that their laptops also were stolen - in those cases, intercepted at the curb right in front of their homes, where a stranger with fake IDs got to the delivery driver first.
Darragh Marmorstein said in an interview Saturday that she went to the Apple Store at the Americana at Brand in Glendale to buy a MacBook Pro on Nov. 21. The salesperson ringing her up told her the card was declined, she said, despite the credit card company assuring her there was nothing wrong. But she said she was told she would have to order the laptop online.
Marmorstein successfully used that credit card to order the laptop online, and planned to pick it up at the store around Dec. 9. She received a notification that it was ready on Saturday, Nov. 30, and she decided to wait until Monday to pick it up, after her in-laws headed home.
"I didn't have it delivered to my house because I was worried about porch pirates," Marmorstein said.
When she called the store beforehand, she learned through an automated message that her order had already been picked up. She went to the store and was told the same thing.
Apple would not reimburse her, Marmorstein said the salesman told her. To get her money back, she would have to file a police report and a claim with her credit card company.
"He did not explain what happened," she said. "They really wouldn't give me any answers."
The Apple employee didn't say whether the person who picked up the laptop showed an ID, but he claimed they showed a QR code sent out to customers when items are ready for pick up, she said.
And Paul Giles of Yorba Linda told NBC Los Angeles in a story that aired Friday that someone claiming to be him picked up a 16-inch MacBook Pro that Giles ordered for his daughter and had expected to pick up in the Apple store, also at the Americana at Brand, last month.
"He says, 'Oh, I'm sorry this has happened,' " Giles said the manager told him when he arrived at the store. " 'Somebody apparently impersonated you and picked it up.' "
The Glendale Police Department and Apple could not be reached for comment on the cases.
In recent weeks, two other people, one in Irvine and the other in Lawndale, also said their newly ordered MacBook Pros were stolen, though in a different way. A man with fake IDs intercepted the packages from delivery truck drivers as he stood in front of the residents' homes.
The residents opened their front doors right after the man picked up the packages from the delivery driver and drove off.
Irvine police are in contact with the other agencies where the thefts were reported, including Glendale, Irvine police spokesman Kyle Oldoerp said.
Though the methods differed, he said, the package contents were the same.
"It's all MacBook Pros," Oldoerp said. "The million dollar question is, how are these suspects getting specific info about a specific product?"