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Some Newegg Customers Received Fake Intel Core i7s
Several readers have mentioned the strange goods that some customers received from Newegg in place of the Intel Core i7 920 processor they ordered. Word on the problem first surfaced on TribalWar on Thursday evening. Newegg still hasn't commented on this. It's not known whether it happened as a result fraud by another Newegg customer, in shipping, or where. The "processors" are made of aluminum, and the "fans" are some kind of synthetic molded material. The "factory seal" was printed onto the box; the holographic stickers on the boxes were also faked. The first part of this video shows the bogus goods. At this writing Google News lists a handful of blogs mentioning the fakes.
I buy AMD!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Probably not on Newegg's part, but somewhere up the chain. According to HardOCP (http://hardocp.com/article/2010/03/05/newegg_selling_fake_intel_cpus) the CPUs came from D&H Distributing. Now currently it is trying to be passed off as "Demo units." Bullshit. No way these things, complete with misspellings, are legit demo units from Intel. Seems more likely that D&H has been buying some things from gray market channels and got burned. Likely to go poorly for them, as Intel may stop distributing to them.
Maybe they were just display models, or mockups for shipping or something.
How's that bit about incompetence being more likely than malice go?
Sent from my PDP-11
This reminds me of the time that I ordered a notebook hard drive from Newegg and the unit that I received came in an opened protective sleeve. The drive failed the first read/write test that I use to check all new hard drives. So I think that Newegg sometimes ships out used equipment, which is not a good idea with a company like this whose tech-savvy customers know when they receive something that does not work.
Considering the shrinkwrap and the contents of the box, to this day I suspect a factory worker took home a little souveneir... but who knows?
Most retail stores have their own shrinkwrap supplies in the back somewhere. If a product comes back in good condition, they'll just wrap it up and put it back on the shelf. That's not to say I suspect any malfeasance on the part of the retailer. An employee could have stolen it without the company's knowledge, or the employee who accepted a return could have just re-wrapped it without opening the box to see if there really was a product in there. Or someone could have just as easily bought the product, swapped it out with the bolt to approximate the weight, then brought the box into their own retail job, where they used their boss's shrinkwrap machine to re-wrap it before returning it.
Breakfast served all day!
Stores frequently have their own shrink wrap machine.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
... on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Newegg/status/10050889498 http://twitter.com/Newegg/status/10050906222 And others.
I would think a factory worker could do it without troubling a customer like that. More people than factory workers have access to shrinkwrapping machines, iirc, in the 1990s, some stores had them so they could sell returned games as new... but then a worker would steal a game and cover it up like this. It's also entirely possible that a previous customer returned the game like that.
Does Newegg warehouse their stuff themselves or have it drop-shipped?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
They won't shoot themselves on their foot like this. As someone said, problem must be in some other part of the distribution chain.
Newegg's reputation is a critical part of their business, people buy on newegg because they expect that - on these type of situations - newegg won't screw the customer.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
Fire up Excel and open any spreadsheet that has a fair amount of numeric calculation. If results greater than 65535 are shown as "#MANY", then you most likely have one of the fake Intel chips.
There is no way they are directly involved and there is no way they won't make good on the substitute goods. NewEgg will likely ship out replacement processors to those who got fakes and deal with the matter themselves. From all my experiences with them, they have given me 0.00 trouble when dealing with a return or exchange. There are few companies I recommend to anyone, but newegg is one of them. There will be no "egg" on their faces when this is all settled. Above everything else, newegg values its reputation and treats its customers right.
(Should they not send replacement processors to the customers, I will presume there is good reason... they have always treated me well.)
...I'm an American and it's my patriotic duty to blame the Chinese.
Guess it's a good thing I opted for a better GFX card instead and went with an i5...
I once bought a Lexar 4GB USB flash drive from a major online store. When it arrived and I plugged it in, it was a 16MB flash drive within a Lexar case.
Fake USB flash drives seem not to be uncommon. I have heard it happen to some of my friends too.
These look like professionally done asian counterfeits to me. It's quite likely organized criminals are involved since it took a lot of resources to custom print the boxes and labels, and make the foam HSFs and fake cpus.
This isn't something the average joe or jane can do in his or her grandma's basement, you've got to have access to professional printing equipment at the very least.
Chances are a substantial number of real CPUs were stolen and replaced with these fakes.
Newegg sells parts, not computers. They won't build your computer for you, you need to order from a specialty company that advertises that service.
Newegg is very transparent about its return policies. If you don't like the return policy for a part, order something else. Everything I ordered for my new PC could be returned for at least another of the same part, most of it could be refunded completely.
To counter your experience, I have NEVER had a bad experience with Newegg. Even when I misunderstood how to hook something up and accidentally sent it back under RMA, they fullfilled the RMA anyway and replaced it (then I got the new part back, had the same experience, figured I was doing something wrong, and figured it out).
Sometimes they will even hack the FAT to make it look like a much larger drive, although obviously you will start getting errors if you try to write beyond its actual capacity... A lot of people get caught out by this because it takes them some time to fill the drive.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Maybe if you weren't such a cheapskate to buy the open box item instead of the regular one, you wouldn't have gotten burned.
http://www.newegg.com/HelpInfo/ReturnPolicy.aspx#29 Newegg will refund open box items, but won't replace them (presumably because they may not have enough stock to replace it)
I had exactly opposite experience. Ordered a $200 motherboard last year, as "open box" item its price was reduced to $85. Was very surprised to receive a completely new motherboard (packaging, no seals broken, completely untouched). Figured that they ran out of "open box" items and must have shipped new items to keep customers happy. I will ALWAYS buy from them - they care about their customers, not just about their pockets.
This is what Intel gets from assembling these boxes in Elbonia. The CPUs are $300, and the pay to the Elbonian packer is $0.17. You were hired from the mud farm, and told to put these little green squares with metal into a box with a plastic propeller in it. Now you discover that these squares you are handling is worth 1 full years salary, and your family is starving.
Maybe your even think the little squares you make will work just as fine as the original ones, and that the end user will not notice. Your cousin tiled his entire bathroom with all the extra P4, and to him, they where all the same. And for the fan, a little plastic toy is pretty much the same whether the car wheels spin around or not, as long as it looks fine.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I also do not think it is Neweggs fault. I purchase a hardware a lot, and often from Newegg. They are one of the few outfits I trust. Twice in the last 6-8 years they refunded my money without too much of a hassle. One time because I received a "lot of" 10 usb drives that were waaaay too slow to be usb 2.0. Their supplier stood by their product and wrote a BS response, but Newegg saw through the BS and gave me my money back.
newegg commented on it on their twitter page
ya like this is what they really should be focusing on organized CRIME
not some kid downloading a music or tv episode.
They've been extremely fast and very responsive. And no, they don't build it for you. That's the point of buying from them so you can have the pleasure of building it yourself. My guess is Newegg got taken on these goods and didn't even know it. I guess we'll see...
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
chances are that newegg was similiarly duped, if they did this deliberately the cost to their business would be unrecoverable. went through something like this years ago with fake maxtor hard drives. turned out someone at the factory got a bunch of rejects, sent them to a shop and they had there firmware crudely rewritten along with professional labels. that is someone from the Western Digital factory.
Maxtor worked with me on it and they were able to tell by the circuit board who really made the hard drives. if memory serves they came from provantage and once I got provantage involved they replaced the entire lot of hard drives.
I have no particular allegiance to Newegg. Just to rational thought.
"open box" generally implies that returns are not allowed or seriously restricted. Your evidence that you got "stuff they know is bad" is based on your unqualified beliefs
1. that "Most companies put them together and fire them up once to make sure they work" (the fact that it came unassembled might be a clue that they did not test it, as per their clear disclaimer: "Please bear in mind that due to the varying quality of testing, you are taking a risk when purchasing open box products. ") and
2. that if an electronic device is working at one point in time, it will work for all of eternity. The products may have worked or appeared to work under testing conditions, which may have been different than your conditions.
You got broken shit. You should have known that was a possibility when buying an open-box item. The lesson you should have learned was to stop buying open-box items, not to stop buying from Newegg.
You can normally tell when stores have tried to resell a returned game cartridge (say, for the DS) as new, because they nearly always forget to wipe the saves on them. Of course, you don't discover that until you get home, when it's too late. On the other hand, I'm the sort of person who'd be happy to buy a good-condition returned game anyway, but there aren't any because they're all being sold as new...
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
Ah, so you're the one who found it. Sorry about that...
Yes, it's sarcasm. Deal with it!
Sometimes they will even hack the FAT to make it look like a much larger drive, although obviously you will start getting errors if you try to write beyond its actual capacity... A lot of people get caught out by this because it takes them some time to fill the drive.
Yep, and most of the time even the retailer doesn't know about it. They buy from gray market, and that's what they get.
It's a worldwide huge issued already as you can see.
There's even a "white list" of good USB sellers in eBay.
Newegg, you're one of the online businesses that I've actually come to respect. I've had excellent customer service from you in the past. This is a problem.
Radio silence does not cut it here. This is what I need to hear from you:
"Dear customers: We have been deeply concerned to hear reports that a few of our customers have received bogus goods after making purchases on Newegg. We have determined that the complaints are legitimate. We rigorously attempt to maintain the highest quality. Despite our best efforts to maintain the highest level of quality control, some customers have in fact received fake goods. This is absolutely unacceptable. We will taking every step to reimburse the affected customers promptly. We will also identify what went wrong here, and will ensure that this will not happen again. Your trust is important to us. We sincerely hope that you find our responses acceptable, and encourage you to contact us with any suggestions, concerns, or tips. Also, we're having a 30% off sale on i7 920 processors, effective immediately."
Look at all the comments here. Reputation is a major thing.
If a company has a reputation for doing right by its customers, as long as addresses a situation like this, it will be OK.
Now compare this to the reputation that Fry's or Tiger Direct had (don't know if either has improved). Would they get the benefit of the doubt this way?
Just goes to show that doing good is just good business.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I think I will keep mine, blue screening less in windows.
Newegg may be at fault if they purchased the CPUs wholesale and didn't properly inspect the shipment or validate the supplier.
That is a professional knock-off. A counterfeit this detailed with printed boxes, stickers, and material in the box to match the weight shipping weight is not free to produce. It is not profitable to go through this much trouble and expense for one or even a dozen units. There must be hundreds out there.
Unless, of course, the fine article author is pulling a fast one. I really doubt it.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Newegg is aware of a shipping error that occurred with certain recent orders of the Intel Core i7-920 CPU. After investigating the issue internally it appears one of our long term partners mistakenly shipped a small number of demo boxes instead of functional units. Our customer service team has already begun proactively reaching out to the affected customers. In line with our commitment to ensure total customer satisfaction, we are doing everything in our power to resolve the issue as soon as possible and with the least amount of inconvenience to our customers."
Why would Intel make a demo box with multiple spelling errors like a poor chinese user manual, and include stapled blank paper and broken plastic parts, and then get it mixed up in the mfg. channel? NO CHANCE. PERIOD.
This is obviously corporate communication lies. I wonder why Newegg, with a large set of loyal customers feel the need to lie so blatantly to its customers. Do they think they are idiots, or is lying just accepted?
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I was at a swap meet a month ago and saw a *pallet* of Core I7 processors. I used Red Laser to scan the UPC codes (they were "Extreme" models selling for $650+ on the open market), and a quick volume computation (the pallet was about 12 high, about 20 horizontal each way) suggested that I was looking at about $3 million worth of processors.
Except, they weren't actual processors. According to the person selling them, they were "fake" processors, but the heatsinks and fans were real and could be used with other processors and motherboards.
Uh-huh. Carrying the original UPC codes. I'm still not sure what to make of it.
Sounds a little excessive for "fraud by another Newegg customer." Another customer would at least have had real stickers (from the original box).
In fact it reminds me of a childhood experience. Back when Final Fantasy "II" came out for the SNES, I bought it at Toys R Us. It was shrink-wrapped and everything. When I opened it, instead of a cartridge it had a bolt with a couple nuts screwed on so it would weigh the same as a cartridge. Fortunately, the manager was willing to swap it out for me--but from then on, I always opened my cartridges at the register after paying. Considering the shrinkwrap and the contents of the box, to this day I suspect a factory worker took home a little souveneir... but who knows?
Hopefully Newegg follows through, I'd be interested to know what happened here. At the very least I imagine they will be inspecting their shipments a little more closely for a while. I buy from them all the time, they have a great reputation, and I doubt they are doing to ignore these claims (whether we hear about it or not).
That's freaking uncanny. When I bought A Link to the Past at Toys R Us, I opened the box in the parking lot and found two bolts instead of a cartridge.
Come to think of it, years later I crunched down onto a much smaller bolt in a soft taco at Taco Bell. Is bolt-related crime this common in everyone else's life?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Agreed, seems a little elaborate for a customer or even Newegg insider, I wonder if their supplier is playing fast and loose with the merchandise. A white plastic mold of a fan with a sticker of flan blades on top? That's going far for a simple return.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
It's forgiveable if they make it right and apologize, but they're the seller. If their supplier or shipper betrayed them they screwed up by selecting that supplier and not watching them closely enough.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Here the link http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Power-Adapter-iPod-iPhone/dp/B001GQ3DP6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1267920282&sr=8-1 I invite you to read the reviews, for me it was no trouble this little guys being fake, I use them to power up a couple of old pda that now act just as fancy clocks and rss readers.
Just after they started selling games in those new small boxes, I was looking around in a Gamestop. I noticed that almost all of their copies of Morrowind looked kinda weird - kinda rough around the edges. I picked one up and looked at it.
Someone had come in, cut the seal open, and snuck the game CD out of the box. From the looks of things, this had happened to almost all of the boxes they had in stock.
No, I think your incidences were just isolated incidents of a couple nuts screwing everyone else over.
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
This is how the china gov get's it's pc parts and they uses there own cops / army to pull it off.
microcenter has them for $60 - $80 less.
This is sooo sweet!
I've been wanting to build a fake computer for quite some time now. It will go perfectly with my fake Italian leather chair and fake wood desk!
once more into the breach
> I was at a swap meet a month ago and saw a *pallet* of Core I7 processors.
Now we know what became of the ones these guys were supposed to get.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I've been very happy with my purchases there--a Panaphonics TV and Sorny monitor. Shop there with confidence.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
That's how they do things. I had a friend that worked for Gamestop for a few years. All disk cases that are on the floor have the discs removed to keep others from stealing them. When you buy a game, they'll put that case back on the shelf and get a "real" one from under the counter. If it's the last one they have or if it's a used game, then they'll put the game disk in a paper sleeve and keep it in a drawer and will put that disc in the display game case when purchased.
gamestop does this itself. they open the boxes, take the disc, and keep it behind the counter. that way people don't open the boxes and steal the disc. when you buy it, they go into the drawer, find a disc, let you inspect it (for scratches and whatnot) then put it in the box for you.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
That is hilarious. I'm glad I never got ripped off like that.
I am sure the legal department would like to follow up on this.
The truth shall set you free!
That makes it sound MORE like a customer, to me. Customers have tons of time on their hands, and whatever weird stuff they can get ahold of. What kind of supplier employee would use materials like?
Not really, if it was someone in the shipping company they needed to maintain the exact same weight feel of the package. if someone could mass produce these fakes it might be worth doing.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
Man you nailed that one.
I've also seen them test the discs in the store to make sure that they at least make it to the title screen.
SSC
Your story reminds me of a teenage experience. In 1991, I had a small project that required small bolts and nuts, so I bought a few boxes of those at Home Depot. The boxes were shrink-wrapped and everything. When I opened one of the boxes, instead of bolts and nuts it had a few E.T. game cartridges in it so it would weigh the same as bolts and nuts. Fortunately, the manager was willing to swap it out for me--but from then on, I always opened my bolts and nuts boxes at the register after paying. Considering the shrinkwrap and the contents of the box, to this day I suspect Atari was looking for creative ways to get rid of their failed game... but who knows?
I'm a customer (or I was in the past, or a potential customer) and I have little time on my hands for such foolishness. The typical customer has time on his hands so he fakes return merchandise? With a plastic mold of a cpu fan, a clearly fake aluminum cpu, and a clearly fake intel seal? I don't think so. That's an operation, you don't make ONE fake shrink wrap of product with all that plus misspelled words. That's a Chinese or Singaporean designed to deceive vendors with pallets of faked merchandise.This was designed to appear as a shipment of valid goods, not one returned product.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
They would not be worth $650 if it were easy and simple to do.
Are they defective or old Core2Duos?
http://saveie6.com/
Sounds less like a customer to me because that's an incredible amount of work to go through to attempt to rip off NewEgg, and as the box would already be open, there'd be nothing stopping NewEgg from opening the returns to verify that everything is there as it should be. Unless they're just not bothering to do that, in which case shame on them, but after looking at the posted pics of just how elaborate this is, this seems far more organized and elaborate than a simple customer. They're not just stuffing fake items in an opened genuine retail box, they're faking everything INCLUDING the box and passing it off as the real deal, and it's a good enough of a fake that it goes undetected until it reaches the customer.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
It's ACTA time.... It's been bought and payed for i think. Somewhere someone must be smiling by now.
None of their employees would really stand anything to gain. My bet is that it is the supplier who was trying to buy from gray market channels as well as legit ones. They had the misfortune of getting bogus chips and the double misfortune of Newegg getting them.
Something tells me Newegg may choose a new supplier.
They wouldn't participate in selling products with shady/fraudulent (almost all of them) mail in rebates or
in over taxation scams where they're charging sales tax on transactions of far more than the amount people
ACTUALLY pay at checkout for their purchases. These go on every day and they're 100% scams / frauds with complicity by the retailers/etailers, the companies making the products, fraudulent rebate processing companies, and fraudulent tax collection scams by the governments to charge people more sales tax than on the amount they actually are paying.
Except for rather than one or two returns, there were several. Few people have the time/materials to make such elaborate fakes to save ~$500.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It happens, I got a brick in a new stereo box from Best Buy, they were actually pretty good about it (to my surprise!). I've never had problems with new egg and I'm sure they'll make it right after some due diligence on their part.
I'm in favour of the factory theft theory. All the pictures I saw of the label had "Sochet 1366" instead of "Socket 1366" and other various spelling mistakes.
This is a boring sig
Anyone can get a shrink wrap machine
I always figured a good slight-of-hand magician could get away with all kinds of "at the cash register" mischief. No shrink wrap machine required...
"Hey! You just saw me open it, and there was nothing in the box but this rabbit!"
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
My friend bought a Motorola phone which came with a "free" USB cable from ebay. Connecting the phone to his PC didn't work at all. After a certain amount of fooling around, he found the cable did not have any wires in it. It had connectors, but the cable was just made of insulation. My explanation? It was a wireless cable.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
We had a problem with some Intel dual port gig cards and NewEgg about five years ago. We had ordered them shipped directly out to the data center (800 miles away) because of an urgent need, but upon installation, we were seeing various odd problems. Suspecting a driver issue, we left them in and returned home. Never resolved the problems. Pulled them a few months later on the next visit. Further research showed that they were phony Intel cards. Apparently several resellers had been hit with these. However, NewEgg maintained that it was no longer their problem because of their return policy (30 days, maybe, I don't remember), and refused to make an exception for goods that they knew were knock-offs. This was really too bad, as we started buying less stuff from them after that.
This is standard procedure for video games, dvds and music in the Netherlands. All the stuff on the shelves is just empty boxes.
Dude, I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when I read that. It is quite possibly the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. Okay, second funniest. But definitely in the top two.
In the case of DS games and DVDs, you can usually have a pretty good clue because very few retail games use "traditional" heat-sealed shrinkwrap; most have the glued flaps. (In the half-dozen years or so since manufacturers went to plastic cases w/flap-wrap, I've seen exactly two games with the "normal" wrap. Both were preorders from a reputable online seller, so I'm doubting that they were resealed copies.)
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Gamestop is worse, in my opinion. Because they sell new games for a higher price than the used games, but they remove all of the games from the cases. So both new and used games are out of the shrinkwrap and they expect you to trust that your game is one of the new ones. Also, there is no option to return the game because it was taken out of the shrinkwrap before you bought it. Is that even legal?
What bothers me is that in both cases, the bad merchandise could have compromised someone's safety.
Bruce Perens.
>>Also, there is no option to return the game because it was taken out of the shrinkwrap before you bought it. Is that even legal?
They put a little paper tab on it to indicate that it's been unopened. I've returned games to gamestop before.
I got one of these fakes on Thursday from newegg...
They don't seem to be in a hurry to refund my money.
----
that's only for their 'gutted' products. Which isn't everything. They usually have one gutted that makes up the store display, and then several unopened in the back or otherwise locked up. If you buy the last in stock of an item they give you the store display and the gutted disk.
Used are usually all gutted.
This thing with newegg almost looks like they are promo boxes or mock ups that got accidentally shipped out.
>>Few people have the time/materials to make such elaborate fakes to save ~$500.
For five hundred bucks, a lot of people would be willing to fake their own deaths.
This happens with SD cards, too.
All the retards who modded this up should maybe google "elbonia".
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
To add to previous comments, why would a customer bother printing up a box rather than just returning the one they got? And, for that matter, returning the fan and manual while they're at it. You do realize that it would cost more to make one of those fan things than buy an aftermarket fan, right? This is clearly a mass produced Chinese fake. Sure fakes are hardly uncommon and one of the many reasons dealing with Chinese production is problematic.
They even do this with games like World of Warcraft, where the CD key itself is what's worth the price on the box, and removing the discs from the sealed box lets anyone with access to the discs to see the key. I bought a copy like this, and while it worked out OK, I was rather suspicious and considered going elsewhere to get it.
A good friend of mine runs a profitable business importing various bamboo products from China. So he goes there all the time, and he's always looking for various products that he might make money importing.
He's a former IT guy. He came home from one trip, super excited, asking me about a deal on USB sticks he found for $XX/GB. It was 3-4X less than everyone else. I did a check on the spot price of the chips, and said "no way, dude, that's a fake" (the flash market is a world wide one). He promptly tested it, filling it all the way up, and copying the files all the way back off. Worked like a charm. ... wait for it... ... until you tried it between two different computers.
The criminals were pretty clever. Dreams of massive riches had to be shelved on that one. :-)
C//
People PAY for flash drives? I have an 8gig model on my keychain from ocz that was free.
. When I opened it, instead of a cartridge it had a bolt with a couple nuts screwed on so it would weigh the same as a cartridge. ...I suspect a factory worker took home a little souveneir... but who knows?
I'd say it was likely a customer return. As a jerky kid with no money in high school I once "replaced" a broken Commodore 1541 disk drive by repacking a brick in the box and re-shrink-wrapping the box. I obtained F-15 Strike Eagle by peeling the sticker of the 5.25" disk and putting it on a blank disk. The manual got its staples straightened and the inside pages removed, replaced with blank paper.
how the hell did that even work? volatile memory is more expensive than flash and i'm not aware of any (simple) technique of telling the OS to store data locally instead.
i could see the device spoofing it's identity to infect the machine via vulnerable USB drivers, then switching ID to a regular mass storage, and using the infection to save the data locally, but that would be really complicated, and if you had a device able to do that i would think selling it with it's normal capacity listed and using the infection to spread malware / botnets would be more profitable.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
But the thing is, faking a death is easy. How many people A) Are computer geeks (the average joe doesn't even know what a Core i7 is) B) has access to a printing press or the like to make a box C) has access to plastic moulds and the like D) has spare aluminium that looks like a CPU.
Faking a death, by contrast, is rather easy, you drive off into the dark, have your car fall off of the cliff and plant some DNA evidence. In a remote enough area people will think your corpse was dragged off by animals and no use looking.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
By delaying the refund, NewEgg will earn more interest from the $ in the bank.
New Economic Perspectives
So this just apparently just a mixup!!!
FragHARD or don't frag at all
In the future, this will become known as "getting Toyotaed". Their "fixes" for sudden out of control acceleration are still failing according to the newest reports.
I had something like this, but more recently.
I went to a large well-known brick and mortar store to pick up a 2TB hard drive I needed right away. On the shelf, there were three WD 2TB green drives. Two were shrink-wrapped, while the third was not. I picked up one of the shrink-wrapped drives, bought it, and left. I had some other errands to run around town, so I didn't get to it right away.
I finally get home and open the box, and pull out the contents. There is an unsealed (never sealed on the end, not sealed and torn) anti-static bag with a drive in it. inside the bag is also a yellow warranty paper, which is conveniently covering up the model numbers. I take them out of the bag and discover an old 30GB PATA drive with lots of dust and scratches.
Pissed off, I check the store's closing time and find I have just over 30 minutes, which is about how long it takes to get there. I put everything back in the box and bust ass getting back up there. The girl at the returns counter was a little baffled at my claim, and called for a manager. They deliberate for a minute or two in a back room, and I am told to get another drive off the shelf. I go grab the other shrink-wrapped box. The girl at the returns counter opened it, and the contents of THAT box were the same as the one I had taken home. She then tells me to get another, and I do. The last box, without shrinkwrap, contained the proper drive.
I have no idea how those old, used PATA drives ended up in "new" 2TB SATA drive boxes. A month or two later, I happened to notice that all of WD's boxes of that design HAVE NO SHRINKWRAP. Just a seal on the flaps at the top and bottom of the drive. If you're getting a WD retail drive at a B&M, and the box is of the 2.5 by 5 by 7.5 inch size, be suspicious if it is in shrink wrap.
Singapore isn't exactly known for fakes. In fact, they actively enforce laws anit-counterfeit laws.
http://www.singaporelaw.sg/content/iplaw2.html
Megaman had to foreshadow his rise to awesome by screwing over Link and other RPG characters.
Talk about bolting a dead horse...
Posts like these need a limit of +10 instead of +5.
Once at Walmart I bought a stick an SD card... got it home, and instead of a 1GB stick, it was like 32MB. The package had been opened and resealed, and someone had clearly gypped walmart by returning the 1GB package with the 32MB card in it. Let me tell you, it was really interesting trying to explain to the manager what the problem was, but they did eventually exchange it.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Still twitter, but they take pains to be very polite.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
yep, helps them sell more shirts. Singapore is a FINE city
There is NO way it is a customer snowjob, as according to this even Newegg admits it was done by a supplier, but they are claiming it was "demo models" that were sent out. Of course we all know this is bullshit, as Intel would have no need to fake their own boxes for a demo model, nor would they use modeled plastic for a HSF, they would just put a bad binned chip in the box and be done with it.
My guess is either the supplier is trying to save face as someone on the factory floor swapped out a load of the real ones for these premade fakes, or someone on the docks had cooked up a shipment of fakes and loaded them in place of the real chips. Considering how much this supplier has to lose by burning Newegg I really doubt the supplier themselves did this, as Newegg has never struck me as the type that would deal with "fly by night" businesses in their supply chain. From the looks of it Newegg as always is being good about treating their customers right, so as long as they make good on the chips it will only make me shop there even more.
After all, anybody can have a problem in their supply chain, things can go wrong, there are always thieves or shippers that will treat a delicate item like a tire chuck. To me it all comes down to how they treat you when something like this happens. It is easy to do business with someone when everything goes right, it is how they treat you when something goes wrong that matters. The few times I've had to deal with Newegg when something went wrong they have always been top notch about it, and I'm sure these folks with have their new Intel chips express mailed right out.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
--but from then on, I always opened my cartridges at the register after paying.
Unnecessary if you are in the US, or a country with similar consumer-protection laws. You are allowed to open the product at the store to inspect it prior to purchase.
If they object to having to repackage (e.g. shrink wrap it again), tough cookies, especially if you fully intended on purchasing the product and found it to be faulty.
This signature intentionally left unblank.
Promo boxes that were intentionally designed to be used as such would come from the same source as the real product, and would therefore have the correct spelling on the packaging.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Where do rich white guys go after they get divorced ?
Singlepoor !
It's the magic of supply chains. People buy from other people for almost everything.
Newegg may buy some items directly from Intel, and others from other vendors who get a better wholesale price.
I'd suspect one of their suppliers offered a slightly better price and/or earlier shipping date, so they bough X pallets of them. Who knows where they were injected into the supply chain. Products aren't opened (or even uncased) until the get to the destination.
There were some very interesting writeups on the same thing happening to the pharmaceutical supply chains. Almost no pharmacies buy directly from the manufacturers. It's more work than the manufacturer is interested in.
The chain can go something like this:
Level 1) Manufacturer, with a few plants.
Level 2) A dozen (or a few dozen) major distributors.
Level 3) Hundreds or thousands of other distributors.
Level 4) Regional distribution companies.
Level 5) Retail distribution centers (like, the DC for CVS/Rite Aid/Walgreens/Walmart/etc/etc/etc)
Level 6) Your local store.
Level 3 may shop around between Level 2 distributors for better pricing.
Level 4 definitely shops around between all the Level 3 distributors.
Level 5 shops level 3 and 4 distributors, depending on the quantities they're ordering.
and Level 6... Well, that's the level Newegg is at. They're just a retail outlet.
If I, producing some counterfeit product, made a contact with a Level 3 distributor, and I could move 10,000 units of a $500 product that cost me $5 to product, it may be worth it to kick back $100k to the "purchaser" to get this in. What salesman wouldn't want to make their regular commission, plus get $100k in small unmarked bills? Sure, you could try to follow the supply chain back, but as the trails run all over the world it'll probably be a lost cause.
Someone's going to eat these losses, and it won't be the guy who injected the counterfeits into the supply chain.
Unfortunately, sales contacts are carefully guarded secrets as you work your way up the chain, so the counterfeiter will just move around without the word getting around too much. They'll change names, locations, and faces, so they won't get caught.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I've seen similar things before but with other products, I once saw a Nikon Camera that upon opening the box you got a working camera, except it was entirely made out of plastic, lenses and all. It did look just like a Nikon until you took it out of the box and felt how light it was (box had stuff to make it heavier in it) and then unwrapped the plastic.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Unless you owe them $500. Then even if you were dragged off by animals they'd still come looking for you.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
From Headline: Headline: Some Newegg Customers recieved fake ...
From Parent: Both were preorders from a reputable online seller, so I'm doubting that they were resealed copies
Is this sarcastic?
I'm a customer (or I was in the past, or a potential customer)
Well, which is it? There isn't much room for ambiguity.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
Because they sell new games for a higher price than the used games, but they remove all of the games from the cases.
All of the new games I have ever bought at Gamestop have come in factory wrap. (And I didn't say "shrinkwrap", because game manufacturers don't use shrinkwrap, they use fitted cellophane.)
I definitely would not buy a game for new price that wasn't wrapped. But I've never gotten one that way. You go up to the counter and ask for a game and they either take one out of the case behind the counter (where they keep a stack of all the more popular games) or they go and get one out of the back. I've never had them tell me to bring the case from the shelf up so they could put the disc in it and give it to me like a used game.
I had a friend of mine who used to work at a gaming store. His job was to steam open the Magic The Gathering card packs, replace the rare cards with bunk and reseal them.
It's not unheard of for a store to just flat out rip people off. I'm not saying this is what Newegg did, I'm a happy customer of theirs - but human nature being what it is I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out to be the case.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Of course we all know this is bullshit, as Intel would have no need to fake their own boxes for a demo model, nor would they use modeled plastic for a HSF, they would just put a bad binned chip in the box and be done with it.
Well, if the boxes did come from Intel, they're not "fakes", are they? Even if they have typos and don't have real holograms, they're still "real" boxes, just demo boxes. I wouldn't expect a demo box to have a real hologram on it, since those holograms are supposed to be the mark of a real product.
I don't know how Intel uses demos, but many manufacturers will create demos for store display or other reasons (for use at conferences or whatever) pre-release. The boxes usually aren't final because packaging is generally the last thing that gets done, after the product is actually created and ready to ship.
It seems believable enough to me that these were demos created for pre-launch display somewhere, and somehow they got mixed in with the real product. It could still have been malicious - somebody could have intentionally swapped a demo box for a real CPU and then kept the real one to sell or use - but I'm just saying that Newegg's explanation sounds plausible enough.
Promo boxes that were intentionally designed to be used as such would come from the same source as the real product, and would therefore have the correct spelling on the packaging.
No, because promo boxes are necessarily released before the product itself has launched, and therefore before the packaging is finalized. It's not expected that people are going to be picking up the promo boxes and reading the fine print, so it generally doesn't get inspected very closely if the overall design looks okay.
Have you seen the condition of their used games? If you got a used game from them, you would have noticed.
Blaming the Chinese is OK. Blaming the Jews is not. Wonder who is behind Slashdot.
No, I've worked with Intel's display boxes. Intel's display boxes, such as are used for making stacks of product at trade shows or for ads and store displays, would be a real box (no typos and no hologram) with clearly fake parts inside only if necessary (anything that fails QC is supposed to be chopped in half!). For trade show decor, real boxes with a cardboard filler for strength is all they get, maybe a chunk of wood for weight.
That font and type quality on the box is NOT Intel ... too fuzzy, like a cheap screen printer was used. When you are making thousands of boxes at a time, you can use better printers.
My guess is that someone in the supply chain made up a batch of these - enough for a case or two of them - and quickly switched the case for a case of genuine parts. Newegg is reporting 200 fakes, that's $80,000 which would be plenty to pay for cheap boxes and some filler bits.
This is very bizarre; I once bought a sealed Nut & Bolt kit from Toys R Us only to find a game cartridge inside!
Just fire up calc and do: 4195835 * 3145727 / 3145727
You should get 4195579 if you have a GenuineIntel processor.
Gamestop does this itself. they open the boxes, take the disc, burn a copy, write down the license key information, pocket the promotional items, and keep it behind the counter.
There, I fixed that for you. I've never seen a loose disc inside a game box, they always come in either a jewel case or a paper envelope, usually "sealed" with some type of sticker. Yet for some reason at GameStop the ones in the envelope nearly always have the little sticker over the flap torn, which indicates the disc has actually been removed and used.
Most legit retailers use dummy boxes for display, they can always get empty dummies for new titles. Stores which refuse to stock filled boxes and which are legit will use a ticket system (like Toys R Us) so they can give you an unopened package. This is just another reason to never use GameStop, it's way too easy to get ripped off by the clerks. And good luck getting valve/steam to un-ban your account when your copie's license number is already in use.
On a side note, I used to work retail at a similar type of store, and yes people do indeed cut the boxes to steal the disc. There's no way to put the RF security tags ON the discs themselves, so as long as you aren't seen tucking it next to your Johnson it makes for easy pickings.
I'm not saying that this happens at every Gamestop, but at one particular location here in Virginia, a manager boasted about how some of the employees may even take a few of the games home to play. For them it may be to "test the product" or some other BS, but you are absolutely right, even when you buy a new game from there, it's never going to factory sealed. You'll be lucky if it's never been used before!
Best "String" Ever!
Simplify: Grab the genuine product from the shelf and bolt.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is bolt-related crime this common in everyone else's life?
No, they're just out to get you, man.
There was a hard drive in an open box for a ridiculously low price. I bought it without checking the contents, and got home to find an ancient hard drive in the box. The store refused a refund and I sued.
I suspect employee theft plus collusion with the store, or else how was the drive on display for so cheap?
Fuck you Best Buy.
I definitely would not buy a game for new price that wasn't wrapped.
Don't you mean fitted with cellophane?
Don't know about the US but in the UK and AFAIK all of Europe your consumer rights override the EULA. If there is a problem with it you can return it for a working replacement or a refund, end of.
They will try to tell you otherwise, that opened software cannot be returned because you might have copied it (despite all the DRM) but your consumer rights trump all their own little rules. That's why "sold as seen" is meaningless too, no matter what the item still has to be "fit for purpose" so at best they could only claim you agreed to any cosmetic issues.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Any word on how well they overclock?
they have a great reputation
Do you ever deal with their customer service? My girlfriend bought a new computer from them and they lied about the specs. OK, maybe they "were mistaken." But we had the list of specs - it listed an Nvidia graphics card that wasn't in the case at all, it only had integrated Intel graphics. It didn't even have a card slot for a discreet graphics card. They'd listed the video RAM separately in the specs, with no mention of "shared" memory or anything, but it turned out it only had shared memory, so effectively much less RAM than they'd sold it with. Plus, this was back in 1997, it had a DVD-drive built in, but it could NOT play DVD's. It didn't have any video playback hardware that supported it, and the machine was not fast enough to handle software decoding, so out of the box, any DVD video would be unwatchably choppy, with the sound cutting in and out and only one frame per second or so.
So we called and complained, and they said we could return it, and get our money back... minus a 15% restocking fee. We said no, that they hadn't shipped us what we'd paid for, that we had the specs they'd advertised, still up on the web page, in the confirmation email they'd sent us, on the shipping receipt... they all matched each other and all did not match the computer. We argued till we were blue in the face, asked to talk to a manager, who gave us the same response, called and talked to someone else, same response, and tried emailing them, same response. A friend, who was a computer science major, didn't believe us that Newegg could be that bad, so HE tried calling, and he got the same response. They did NOT attempt to argue that they had shipped us a computer that matched the specs, or that we were somehow mistaken. They just said that, despite their significantly inaccurate description, if we returned it, we had to pay the restocking fee. And we hadn't waited to complain or anything, we were on the phone with them within 24 hours of delivery. This was about an $800 computer, so they wanted us to pay return shipping plus they kept a $120 "restocking" fee.
I encouraged my girlfriend to contest the charge with her credit card company, but she just paid it because she was so sick of the situation and mad about it, she just wanted it to be over.
As far as I'm concerned, Newegg are just a bunch of con-artists.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
how the hell did that even work? volatile memory is more expensive than flash and i'm not aware of any (simple) technique of telling the OS to store data locally instead.
Easy: just return success to every write, even if it's beyond the end of the device. The read will then come out of the buffer cache. If you do the test on a lightly loaded machine with gobs of RAM, and if you don't remove-and-reinsert the drive, you'll be fooled.
Most people here on Slashdot would probably remove-and-reinsert, but those less knowledgeable may not know that they need to do this for proper testing.
Another thing to watch out for is sticks which are waaaaaay sloooooow. Apparently you can get USB storage for ridiculously low $XX/GB if you don't mind needing an entire week to fill that storage...
Of course, you don't discover that until you get home, when it's too late.
It's never too late. If you got ripped off by a store, take that product back and bitch. It's not a court of law, you don't need to have proof that you are right. Just stand your ground, and they will cave. The more expensive the item, the longer they will argue with you, but you'll win in the end. It is simply not worth the money to argue with you.
However, don't make it personal. Don't blame anybody specifically. Don't piss anyone off. You want the manager to be able to walk away happy that he/she made a rational and correct cost-benefit decision (i.e. feeling like a winner)
But think about it for a second...why would Intel need to create a fake box, complete with bad typos, for their own product when they literally have a whole warehouse full of real boxes they ship their real products in? Or to go to all the trouble of making a fake chip, when you have a bad bin full of real Core chips that weren't any good?
It wouldn't make any sense at all to go to that much extra trouble and expense when you could just take a pile of chips from the bad bin, have them boxed up with the bottom of the line HSF, and label them "demo-for display purposes only" and be done with them. No, the only logical conclusion to this is someone in the supply chain cooked up these boxes at home or with a friend, hence the amateur hour look, and switched them for the real chips which are probably being sold in small batches on some online auction like eBay. Look up "fake Intel CPU" and you'll see this isn't the first time this has been done, some even going to the trouble of taking a low quality Celeron chip and reflashing it so it appears to the BIOS like a more expensive version.
So I would say both Newegg and this supplier got burned by someone in the chain, either at the warehouse or on the docks. It happens, thieves can strike at many different points in the chain, especially if they have a way to switch out the product like this, but I'm sure that Newegg will make things right by their customers which in the end is all that matters.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
i ordered an i7-920 about in October of last year, and have been a happy Newegg customer for years. surprisingly after looking at the pictures of the faked goods a quick look would not raise any red flags. but closer inspection reveals many issues (box alone) like a 7 grader faking a progress report! (i admit it, statute of limitations is up) i suspect that these counterfeits are from a non English speaking, or an amateur counterfeiter. what gets me is that i could have been shipped a counterfeit, the packing that was only a month off. what i would like to see is what steps Intel is going to take to remedy this. faked electronics is becoming a large problem, even if the faked goods operate exactly as their non-faked counterparts.
I bought a $50 broken laptop for parts.. The wife searched through the carry case and saw paperwork for an extended warranty (gotta love her). It was on the last month, so I took it back to Best Buy (gotta hate them), who offered the warranty, not the manufacturer. They were being asshats and trying to tell me that they could only give me a replacement that was a very low end no-name laptop with a smaller screen, while the one I had was middle/higher end Toshiba. They using the CPU speed as the only metric, and the "new" one was faster, so it was better, and I was "lucky". I told them I wanted the exact same model (as per the extended warranty paperwork), which was of course, impossible. I just wanted something that was in the same original price range, to be fair, not something half the price.
Long story short, I was polite but direct, didn't get personal, and just happened to have a very loud speaking voice that was asking why they weren't going to honor their own extended warranty, in a reasonable way, over and over, while the place was crowded. After 30 minutes, I walked out with a $1300 gift card, which was the original cost minus warranty/tax. It doesn't matter that I bought it used or knowing it was broken, it was the fact that it had a warranty and I expected them to honor their own agreements.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Care to share the URL?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I never trust an outfit that has return policies like new Egg. Unless you prove that the item is defective, and note you have to find some way of proving that it's defective over the internet, especially after you have already returned it, they charge you a 15% restocking fee. It's not illegal, but it's still bullshit. I need to trust the products are quality and that if they aren't the merchant is willing to stand behind them.
I bought an SD chip from they a while ago. It didn't work. So I returned it saying it was defective and got a new one, which worked. Well they charged me the 15% restocking fee even though I said it was defective. I later bought an external hard drive case, that to this day is a little flakey, but it was one of the higher end cases that supposedly got good reviews. The risk of the 15% restock fee was not worth it.
That's not good customer service. I'm surprised to this day how much good press it gets from some slashdotters, but they don't get my business any more. I don't trust their customer service or their quality. I know this is anecdotal but I'm just throwing my $.02 in.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Back when Final Fantasy "II" came out for the SNES, I bought it at Toys R Us. It was shrink-wrapped and everything. When I opened it, instead of a cartridge it had a bolt with a couple nuts screwed on
That's a coincidence. One day, I bought a box of nuts and bolts, and inside......
I would suggest this is more of a Teamsters, organized crime type thing. A pallet of real processor is replaced with a pallet of fakes by an employee. The pallet looks the same and weighs the same so nobody notices. A new distributor pops up for a week selling cut rate real processors and are gone before the fakes make it through the supply chain. When a box falls off a truck, people notice. When a pallet is replaced, nobody will even be able to find out which warehouse, shipping company, or even country, made the switch.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
My guess is a warehouse somewhere got jacked, several cases of intel core7 went to the blackmarket and several cases of fakes ended up at Newegg. those processors retail for $588 at newegg so the hijackers are making a pretty good chunk of change for each one, enough to attract an organized criminal effort.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
several years ago I bought a 4800+ from newegg which was DOA. In the RMA process they claimed that they would "examine and test" the returned CPU to verify that it was really and truly DOA as well as looking, apparently, for mechanical damage caused by me. (It looked perfect, just didn't power up with two different PSUs with which a 3200+ worked. Unfortunately only had the single mb to test with. The only problem I had with them was that they claimed that they would return ship by FedEx overnight which they failed to do leaving me with a week before receiving the replacement. I shipped my DOA back by USPS plain old standard package shipping and it was at their warehouse by noon the next day FFS! (I love the USPS, best price and the max time from west coast has been 3d which you get to pay ALOT extra for from the private carriers, plus USPS moves stuff ALL of the time not just weekdays PLUS Saturday delivery for free. Yeah I know I heard all about damaged packages etc. but I've also heard that of UPS and FedEx and comparatively speaking all of my USPS shipments generally arrive in better shipping packaging shape than the private carriers ever manage, not to mention USPS has failed to "lose" any of my packages yet...)
So... I find the customer fraud bit a bit difficult to swallow. More likely someone inhouse thief and/or maybe newegg is having some financial problems? (Which would suck as they tend to have the best overall pricing if not always the absolute lowest price on varying components.)
Does newegg still just ship out of NJ(? IIRC or was it NY?) and California?
In the case of AMD/Intel, the packaging is going to be as standardized as possible because it's cheaper that way. Part of the reason for this is each line of CPU is designed for a specific Socket such as AM2/LGA775 and such. Sure the CPU Die itself varies on each chip but the socket is a set size and they tend to use very few HS/F combo's in order to keep costs down. Yes you will see a different HS/F for a Low Power Celeron then a Pentium-D but when you look at the packaging they're almost identical for both processors with the diffs being the internal spacer/filler for the HSF.
Where you'll see the differences are the Fonts, Colors and Graphics used on the various lines but overall it's like looking at a GM Dealership. Can you tell the Chevy from the Buick when they're built on the same platform? Sure the differences are there but guess what, they're cosmetic (paint, tailights, headlamps, trim) not substantial and that's the concept that both Intel and AMD follow in their packaging. Another reason is making it easier to spot Fake and counterfit products like this appears to have been.
For those who don't know it, a standard 8meter shipping container of Intel processors has a street value of 10-50 million (dollars/euros) and it takes an organized group to pull off such a operation. I suspect that Interpol/FBI/NSA/CIA/Intel are all involved in figuring out where the theft/diversion of the goods took place.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
should not be what the fan was made out of, but how well did they perform ?
Meanwhile, somewhere in the US during the early-1980s at a small department store chain that no longer exist:
I once wondered where a friend of mine snagged so many pirated games for his Atari 400. Turns out, one of his best friends (who had an Atari 800) worked at a department store with one of the first dedicated computer departments (it was awesome, they had desks set up with a Vic, 64, 400, 800, and a Pet so you could try them!). Seems as though somebody bought a Happy enhanced 850 drive to match his 800, and managed to find the shrinkwrap machine.
Un-freaking-real. Those guys had EVERYTHING.
Ok here is the real problem. There are 5 authorized distributors for retail boxed cpus. Newegg has admitted D&H is the distributor. Newegg is a direct to end-user retailer. How/Why is it that they are able to sell to an end-user for $288 when the same cpu to valued D&H partners wholesale is $305. This is very unethical. Newegg should not be able to sell to end-users for less than a reseller is even able to buy the cpu for. How are we to be competitive? We're not. Newegg strongarms distributors all the time. ASI is a big drop shipper for them and they sell stuff to newegg for 10% less than their listed "cost" in their system. This is why there is such a huge gray market anyway. A reseller is committing suicide to buy from authorized channel. Here's the other issue, they are claiming that D&H SHIPPED them 2000 cpus and 300 were fakes. Newegg doesn't stock ANYTHING (ok a very small percentage) it is all drop-shipped. So these had to ship directly from D&H to customer (someone post the address of the warehouse of your fakes). Newegg sucks, they can't ever manage to ship same day even if ordered at noon EST. Especially if you pay for next-day air. I've paid for express shipping from NJ to MD (1 day ground typically) and receive the product a week later. I get products faster from them via USPS Mail Innovations (the cheapest/slowest method) than I do from UPS/Fedex. Worst part is Newegg can't tell you where the product is, or when it's shipping (b/c they drop ship everything). It makes no sense that you can order from any other computer company up until 5pm/6pm/7pm EST and have next day, yet you're lucky to get something from Newegg even shipped for 2 days+
Well fucking played, sir.
Breakfast served all day!
The OEM version of Office 2007 is sold like this, where there is a Medialess License Kit that contain the CD key (and the offer for a recovery CD for the customer), and there is a OPK master kit for OEMs that contain the CDs for OEMs to preinstall on their computers and preinstallation tools too.
and Level 6... Well, that's the level Newegg is at. They're just a retail outlet.
Are you sure? NewEgg is the 9th largest online retailer. That's more business than Best Buy does online (100 million more), and only 500 million less than CDW (and many small/medium businesses get all their IT products through CDW, IT shops included).
At that size, they're probably slightly more than "just a retail outlet". While Amazon does roughly 8 times more business, when it comes down to computing, NewEgg is the most likely to have it (and at a better price).
NewEgg, like Amazon, has multiple distribution centers. That tells me that they're at least operating at the "regional distribution/Level 4" area, particularly due to the fact that they're a specialized distributor.
Given the volume that NewEgg does, there's little to no chance they're going to be getting things from that many levels of intermediaries. Ask yourself: who probably pushes more i7 920s: Best Buy (online or otherwise) at $299 (and 7 online reviews) or NewEgg - at 10 dollars less and over 2,000 reviews? I'd bet that NewEgg is getting boxed processors from the same channels that the smaller computer builders (the ones which are left, at any rate) do: level 2 or 3.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Newegg..
Fraekin Hilarious..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQrAOQ4TzQc
his Core i7 is fake....
hilarious video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQrAOQ4TzQc
And the self-reply
browser glitch.... I didn't think the first one made it.
+10
Amen to that... I've spent many thousands at NewEgg, almost everything is always fine, but a year ago I got a bad ASUS motherboard, had parts of the board rolling around in the box when I opened it. I needed it pretty quick, so I called and without even asking hard the NewEgg rep send me a replacement overnight for no extra charge, and paid return shipping on the board I had.
Yep, the replacement board was bad as well. Had a third board the next day, which worked.
I will ALWAYS buy at NewEgg, even if it is $20 cheaper everywhere else. That kind of service is work it when you need it. I don't even shop around anymore, I know sometimes NewEgg is a few $$$ more than Amazon or another on-line retailer, but I don't care, the service is second to none at the Egg.
I PREORDERED Heavy Rain from Gamestop.
Come arrival day, I got the call - they put a disc OUT OF CASE into a Heavy Rain box and slapped a sticker on it.
I was LESS than happy.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Some enterprising person godwinned the entire issue nicely for us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQrAOQ4TzQc
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yea, I had a bad customer experience w/ newegg. I bought a printer/scanner, and it came with the side kicked in. I figured it was a disgruntled employee. Still it took them awhile to take it back and they wanted me to outlay more cash to buy a replacement while the "refund" worked it's way through the system, I mean you've got to be kidding me.
You spent longer dialing Newegg than it's taken me my two credit card chargebacks. "Hi, I didn't get the item I paid for on xx/xx/20xx." "Was it the wrong item?" "No, it never arrived." "OK" and done. That's all it takes. And they find in your favor almost all the time. I use credit cards whenever I can, and I'll chargeback anything that isn't what it said it was and they give me that grief. It's simple and painless, and because Paypal is evil, it's like an escrow for ebay purchases. They don't ship it, I chargeback (well, only done once, but makes me much more comfortable with paying a stranger for something I don't have in my hand).
Learn to love Alaska
Some people I know that used to work at Futureshop told me about this one.
This is something they did before working at Futureshop, and people did do to Furtureshop while they were working there.
Here is what you do.
1) Buy a top o' the line 500$ video card.
2) Replace your POS video card with the new one... ya games!
3) Take your old video card and put it in the new box and return it for a full refund.
4) PROFIT!
In addition, the minimum wage flunky that is tasked either can't identify, or simply doesn't give a minimum wage shit about it, and shrink wraps the package and sells the returned video card.
For extra credit, you can also shrinkwrap the box at home, and that way a flunky will not even look at it, it will just go on the shelf. In addition, if you are actually buying a video card at futureshop there is a good chance the consumer will just install your old card and not know the difference.
For extra extra credit, you could also remove the heatsink from the new card (because you have an after market one anyway) and replace it, using the old heatsink on your old card, making it pretty much look the part of the 500$ card.
I have also heard of the less savvy but apparently still works, stuffing the box with heavy stuff, rocks, floor tiles etc...
Anyway a nightmare if you take it home and open it I suspect.
Newegg is aware of a shipping error that occurred with certain recent orders of the Intel Core i7-920 CPU. After investigating the issue internally it appears one of our long term partners mistakenly shipped a small number of demo boxes instead of functional units. Our customer service team has already begun proactively reaching out to the affected customers. In line with our commitment to ensure total customer satisfaction, we are doing everything in our power to resolve the issue as soon as possible and with the least amount of inconvenience to our customers.
Wow, they were too cheap to even weigh it down with a brick, huh?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
All of the new games I've bought at Gamestop came unopened with the security stickers intact, still in the shrinkwrap (or, more accurattely, "fitted cellophane" as someone else pointed out). I would never accept a new game in a box that had been opened. They have a display case on the shelf that's opened (with the disc removed), but when I take it to the counter and they pull out the actual game, it's always an unopened one. I've never had them try to foist an opened one on me. It could be that my experience is exceptional.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just because it's fitted cellophane doesn't mean it's factory wrapped. A few years ago I found "see-through wrapping paper" at I think it was a Staples. I bought some and found it very easy to re-wrap a DVD so that it appeared to be factory wrapped.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
This works best when they are at fault, but it is SOOOO often abused to get stuff for free and cost the company money when its the user's fault or something the manufacturer has to deal with. There are a lot of snobby suppliers/manufacturers who often don't want to deal with the retail store, only with the customer.
I really hate those sites and shows that tell people to argue, bitch, moan, complain, throw fits to get what they want. Its like caving in to a tantrum from a 5 year old.
"There isn't much room for ambiguity."
Sure there is, when you can't remember if you were ever were a customer and really don't care, and that status hardly matters for an opinion.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
"Newegg is currently conducting a thorough investigation surrounding recent shipments of questionable Intel Core i7-920 CPUs purchased from Newegg.com.
Initial information we received from our supplier, IPEX, stated that they had mistakenly shipped us "demo units." We have since come to discover the CPUs were counterfeit and are terminating our relationship with this supplier. Contrary to any speculation, D&H Distributing is not the vendor that supplied us with the Intel Core i7-920 CPUs in question.
Newegg’s top priority is to proactively reach out to all customers who may have been affected to ensure their absolute satisfaction. We have already sent out a number of replacement units and are doing everything in our power to resolve the matter promptly and with the least amount of inconvenience to our customers.
We have always taken pride in providing an exceptional experience for each customer, and we apologize for any inconvenience to our valued customers. We take matters like this extremely seriously, and are working in close cooperation with Intel and the appropriate law enforcement authorities to thoroughly investigate this incident."
A few years back I ordered some gear online.. Forget exactly most likely memory or disk drives. All but one item I purchased came in the box. The missing item had apparently been replaced with a red stapler. I would have been pissed if I could stop laughing.
Contacted the shop and they saw the mistake in their inventory and sent out the missing item. I got to keep the shiney red stapler!!
That's how they do things. I had a friend that worked for Gamestop for a few years. All disk cases that are on the floor have the discs removed to keep others from stealing them. When you buy a game, they'll put that case back on the shelf and get a "real" one from under the counter. If it's the last one they have or if it's a used game, then they'll put the game disk in a paper sleeve and keep it in a drawer and will put that disc in the display game case when purchased.
And they'll STILL try to charge you full "new game" price for it.
Fuck Gamestop.
Didn't P133s have a 2x multiplier and P100s had 1.5x? And that was in the days of locked multipliers. Those must've been some pretty exceptional P100s. Not only that, but wikipedia has them listed as using different sockets! Granted, it was a long time ago, and you may have gotten some details off -- or if I'm wrong, please correct me.
As has happened to every other society in history. Evil is a disease.
http://www.ponerology.com/
Not my proudest moment, but not too long ago games retailers were REALLY dumb about this. They'd put all kinds of games on the shelves that were used either just loose in the original box, or if the box wasn't around, then they'd just shrink wrap the disc and the manual. I'd just go walking around with a notepad and a pen and I'd scribble down dozens of cd-keys.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Yeah thats complete bs, I wouldn't have paid for it myself.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
There was a bolt in your soft taco? Holy crap! According to an episode of Kenan and Kel (I hope some of you remember that show) you could totally sue them for a life supply of tuna. I mean lots of money.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
I'm hoping someone can find this link, somehow I must have lost the bookmark. Anyway I think it's from this BFG or XFX tech, posting pictures of all the wacky things people did to graphics cards to try and defraud the vendor via the RMA process. Ancient AGP cards hacksawed, duct-taped, painted and mounted behind a Geforce 9800 GTX heatsink.
Customers indeed have tons of time on their hands, and statistically speaking there's no shortage of stupid in this world. After all, if they had any brains they'd be doing your job, right ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Newegg was founded in 2001, yet this all took place in 1997? I call shenanigans, both on this story and the notion that you have a girlfriend.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
I'm not saying that this happens at every Gamestop
It happens at every Gamestop.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Ack! You're right, it was egghead.com, not newegg.com. I had thought that Egghead had turned into Newegg as some sort of revamp, but researching that now, I see that is incorrect. The two have nothing to do with each other, egghead was aquired by Amazon, coincidentally around the time that Newegg showed up. Now I feel bad that I posted that with regard to Newegg, I wish I hadn't, I absolutely did NOT mean to bad-mouth the customer service of a company incorrectly.
But I did and still do have the same girlfriend, and the customer service experience is true. Thanks for correcting me, I really did get confused about the egghead/newegg thing, and need to be more careful in the future before badmouthing a company to make sure I am not in error. Sorry Newegg!
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
They probably figured that gamers would be more entertained and less likely to return the package if it contained a couple of bolts instead of E.T.
Egghead seriously sucked when they changed from a brick-and-mortar to a strictly online shop. Their physical shops were great, but they were clueless when it came to running an e-commerce business. I totally believe your story. I also had a bad experience with their online operation, but it was for something cheap and it was eventually resolved in my favor.
You should contact the mods and ask them to mod your "Newegg" rant down to -1 so fewer people will see it.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
The employees are supposed to be salespeople, so they have to know the product, so they're supposed to play video games at home for five days so they know them....
Support my political activism on Patreon.
So, the ENTIRE service department at NewEgg got your girlfriend to bend over?
Dude, that one's a keeper. Put a ring on her.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
That was not my experience. The DVI input on the LCD monitor I bought from them stopped working a week after I bought it. I never received a response to multiple requests, so I have not bought from them in years.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
*golf clap*
I drank what? -- Socrates
I'm the IT Manager at a small business, and I buy more hard drives than the typical person would. After several from a batch I bought for a big RAID had problems I switched from Seagate to WD, but when more and more drives started arriving with half-assed packaging I now place the blame on Newegg's warehouse practices. Too many drives that had not enough bubble wrap and were sitting in the bottom of the box with peanuts or crumpled paper on top of them. I now pay a little more and get drives from CDW, where they arrive with each drive in its own box suspended between plastic spacers that cradle it on both ends. Everything else I still buy Newegg because I hate CDW's website, but I don't trust that they're being gentle with their drives when they handle or package them.
There was a bolt in your soft taco? Holy crap! According to an episode of Kenan and Kel (I hope some of you remember that show) you could totally sue them for a life supply of tuna. I mean lots of money.
That's a good point, but I was distracted at the time. As I got to the front of the line a three year old girl came sprinting away from her mom, ran into my legs, fell down and started crying. Then she pointed at me as she cried, making everyone around (I assume) think I had kicked her or something. What's _that_ about?!
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)