iPad 2 craze and corruption

As my siblings and I are contemplating to buy an iPad 2 for our Dad in Hong Kong for Father's Day, my brother in Hong Kong told us that iPad 2s were still out of stock there.  There is no official Apple store in HK, so resellers, typically large electronic chain-stores such as Fortress allows customers to buy 2 iPad 2 per day (with a catch that the "preferred" customer is expected to buy a second product from the store of at least HKD2,000 or USD256).  Even before the day of legal sale (April 29) of iPad 2 in HK, iPad 2s had already travelled from the U.S. (which started selling on April 3) via students, buyers, etc. and had fetched prices in the grey market almost doubled that in the U.S.  There are often long queues in front of the HK stores for iPad 2, not just because they are popular in HK, but because there are Hong Kong people who are "hired" by buyers from mainland China where iPad 2 is still not available for sale.  Allegedly a person who brought an iPad 2 into China can get a rebate of about USD60 per iPad.


The story gets more interesting as reported by Apple Daily (a Hong Kong newspaper) and an Apple Daily video translated into English by M.I.C. Gadget.  Apparently, a man in a black T-shirt bought 40 iPad 2s in one day at a Fortress store in HK. He brought a crowd of 19 people with him who stood aside while he was purchasing, but the man was not seen to have purchased any secondary products at the store.  The man took the 40 iPad 2s and exchanged the iPad 2s with a buyer at a phone shop at a Mongkok shopping mall for a stack of cash.  The Apple Daily reporters calculated that all profit (stack of cash minus all the expenses paid to helpers, store employeers as rebate, etc.) earned by the man in black with the 40 iPad 2s (wifi+3G, 64GB) amounted to USD2,290. Why could the man buy all the 40 iPad 2s while others in the queue not?  It is because apparently store employee can give out the news when the iPad 2s will be in stock and earn a rebate of up to USD13 per iPad.  The anti-corruption agency, ICAC, Hong Kong got wind of the problem and investigated people at the Fortress store and the shop at Mongkok and others and seized 500 iPad 2s.

Then I read another story about a 17-year-old boy in China selling his kidney for iPad 2, an iPhone and some bonus...

I think my siblings and I had better wait after the iPad 2 craze has died down, and if we are lucky, we maybe able to get an iPad 1 for our Dad.

[Update:: No more scrambling - the official Apple Store was launched in Hong Kong in September 2011].