The old saying goes, "If something sounds too good to be true ..."

One woman was reminded of that the hard way on July 16, when a man approached her in a parking lot near 176^th Street and Halsted Street and offered to sell her a MacBook computer for $400, police say. Skeptical, the woman said no, but kept the man’s number in case she changed her mind, which she did later that day, according to the police report.

She returned to meet the man, whom she described as black and in his 20s, with dreadlocks and numerous marks on his face, around 4:15 p.m. Though he demanded the cash up front, the two negotiated—$200 for a look at the computer first, police said. She gave him $200 and he handed her a FedEx box before getting in the passenger’s seat of a late 1990s model, gray four-door Oldsmobile while hastily saying, “I’ll meet you across the street,” the woman said. With that, the man was gone.

The woman quickly opened the shipping carton and thought at first she’d gotten the real deal; only to find what looked like a Mac in bubble wrap was a similarly shaped and weighted block of wood.

Police report information is provided by the Homewood Police Department and other law enforcement agencies. Charges are not evidence of guilt. They are a record of police actions on a given day, and persons charged with a crime are presumed innocent until proven guilty in court. If you or a family member are charged or cited and the case is subsequently adjudicated, we encourage you to notify the editor. We will verify and report the outcome.