Depression Cooking/YouTube Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

The depths which humanity can plumb would fit a whole synchronized swimming team, each member standing on the next's shoulders.

This is just one more piece of evidence.

Please imagine the essential goodness of a woman in Australia who went onto the classifieds Web site Gumtree, in search of a couple of iPhones.

As the Herald Sun reports, the core of an agreement was reached between the woman and another woman who called her on seeing the ad.

They arranged to meet at a McDonald's in the Sunnybank suburb of Brisbane.

All went very well. The buyer handed over 1,500 Australian dollars (around US $1,336). In return, she got two shiny new iPhones still in their shiny new boxes.

At least, that's what she thought.

But in the latest tale of trusting buyers who should have caveated before being an emptor, when she opened the boxes all that was inside were two apples. One in each box.

Yes, these boxes were all natural logo and no gadget. The seller had been rotten to her pips.

Though some might wonder what special care the seller must have taken to fit two apples precisely into iPhone boxes. And, wait, didn't the box smell a touch?

This isn't the first time a private transaction for an Apple product has been a touch unbalanced.

There was the woman who bought a $180 iPad in a Spartanburg, S.C. parking lot. It turned out to be made of wood. Well, at least it had an Apple logo. Oddly, the parking lot also belonged to McDonald's.

Then there was the British man who bought a $390 iPad in a parking lot. The box turned out to be full of potatoes.

But Spartanburg is still the capital of such torrid offenses. For it was there that two women paid $250 for a paper laptop. At least it had a power cord.

At the most basic level, it's surely worth opening the box before handing over the money. It seems unconscionable that people would offer large sums and have no assurance of what might be inside.

Yet such incidents seems to happen again and again.

Will people never learn? No, they won't.