What was meant to be a celebratory moment turned into shock for Ahmed Saeed after he opened the box of his newly purchased iPhone 17, only to find it filled with neatly packed stones.
The incident happened Thursday evening after Saeed bought the phone from a mobile shop in Al Ain. Believing the sealed packaging was authentic, he chose to open it at home with his family instead of at the store.
“It felt like the real thing — perfectly sealed, same weight, same packaging,” Saeed told Al Khaleej newspaper. “There was no way to suspect anything was wrong.”
The shopkeeper, who was also surprised, admitted the unit had not come from an official distributor and may have passed through unreliable supply chains. He refunded Saeed in full and retrieved the counterfeit box, which the buyer described as looking “100 percent genuine.”
