Woman paid man $800 for place in queue to buy $100,000 of original iPhones before realizing she'd made expensive mistake

A woman paid $800 to be the first in line at the Apple store to snap up $100,000 worth of original iPhones to resell, but it turned out to be a costly mistake.

Steve Jobs officially unveiled the Apple iPhone in January 2007 and kick-started a media frenzy. 

It went on sale the following June, and people eagerly queued up overnight to get their hands on one. 

With demand for the new device sky-high, one woman thought she had a foolproof way of earning herself some easy money, but she didn’t plan for one thing. 

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She gave the man at the front of the Apple store queue $800 to take his place

Every year, Apple launches its latest iPhone and every year it attracts plenty of media attention and, of course, plenty of sales. 

And if you thought the hype around the newly released iPhone 17 was wild, then you’d probably struggle to believe just how big the original iPhone launch was. 

At the time, people hadn’t seen a phone quite like this one before, and they were desperate to snap one up. 

And a woman in Dallas, Texas, thought she had come up with a smart idea to make a heap of cash. 

With demand for the iPhone so high, she planned on heading out to the Apple store and spending $100,000 on iPhones, which she would then resell on eBay for more than she had originally paid. 

At the launch, a brand-new iPhone would set you back $499, but the woman told Fox 4 Dallas that she reckoned she could sell them for a lot more online. 

But of course, she’d need to actually get inside the store to make the plan work – and rather than spend a night on the cold, hard ground outside, she paid the guy at the front of the queue $800 to take his place. 

What could go wrong? Well, there was one thing she’d overlooked.

Her plan to snap up $100k worth of iPhones didn’t work out

When the doors of that Dallas Apple store finally opened on  June 29, 2007, the woman was indeed the first to get inside. 

However, what she didn’t know was that the store had put a strict limit of just one iPhone per customer. 

This meant that rather than $100,000 worth of iPhones she had hoped to leave with, she ended up only being able to buy one – and had parted with that additional $800 for nothing. 

Things worked out better for the guy whose spot she took in the queue. 

Not only did he still get one of the brand-new iPhones, but he also made $800 in the process. 

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