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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.
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.
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!
... on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Newegg/status/10050889498 http://twitter.com/Newegg/status/10050906222 And others.
I believe they have 3 warehouses around the country.
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.
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.
You've said that before in this thread - and you were just as wrong then as you are now.
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.
This post claims NewEgg got 300 fakes in a shipment of 2000 from a distributor.
Nice troll, but all of the Core i7 CPUs from Intel come from fabs in the US or Costa Rica.
And in Costa Rica, they pay almost double the local average wage.
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The parent is actually sorta right. Usually the place where a chip is manufactured and assembled are different. By manufacturing I mean actually doing lithography on the silicon and creating the chip. This is mostly automated and you do not need a lot of people to do it. There are also bans against exporting high-end lithography machine tools to non-allied countries (including China). Assembly usually consists of lining up the package with the chip so the pins match. Lining up is IIRC a highly labor intensive process, done by hand, and is usually done in countries where salaries are low. e.g. AMD does their assembly in Malaysia. Even China is probably too expensive.
What bothers me is that in both cases, the bad merchandise could have compromised someone's safety.
Bruce Perens.
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)