A US woman thought she had snared a bargain when she forked out $168 for what she believed was an iPad, only to discover she had just purchased a very expensive piece of wood.

Ashley McDowell, 22, bought the item from two men in the parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant in Spartanburg county, South Carolina overnight.

The men said they had bought the iPads in bulk and were selling them for only $280, a sharp reduction from the $465 US retail price.

Ms McDowell told the men she only had $168, which they accepted, giving her a FedEx box which they assured her had an iPad inside.

It was not until Ms McDowell was driving home that she opened the package and realised she had just bought a block of wood with a painted on Apple logo.

The screen was also painted on, framed with black tape and had stickers attached representing a web browser, email inbox and iPhoto.

“Basically what they’d done is taken a screenshot of an iPad screen turned on, with a copy of a Best Buy sales ticket on front. On the back they’d pasted a cut-out of the Apple logo,” Lieutenant Tony Ivey, a public information officer at the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office said, The Smoking Gun reports

-Uknown