KXAS TV Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

Sometimes our greed is merely a reflection of our true selves.

Sometimes we really do believe we will get something for nothing -- or at least very little.

Take Jalonta Freeman of Arlington, Texas. She was at a gas station. Suddenly a man drove up to her and offered her an $800 iPad for a mere $200.

Wouldn't you have been slightly suspicious? Wouldn't you have at least opened the box to check whether there was, well, an iPad inside?

Freeman took the deal.

"He was, like, OK, I gotta hurry up and go and stuff," she told KXAS-TV.

.

It was only when she drove away that the magic box was opened.

The back side of her new iPad looked (vaguely) like an iPad. But the front, sadly, was a sham.

There was a piece of paper which, when stripped back, revealed a mirror.

"That's messed up. That's so wrong," Freeman told KXAS. "I would never do anybody like that. Get a job."

Oh, but this may be his job: fooling those who think they can buy an iPad at a gas station for $200.

Freeman is, of course, not the first to be duped into buying something somewhere she shouldn't.

Who could forget the South Carolina woman who last year paid $180 for an iPad in a McDonald's parking lot?

It was made of wood.

Yes, the holiday season is upon us. We will be tempted by the impossibly cheap.

So remember this one tiny adage: the impossibly cheap is impossible.