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.

Comments

Well something fishy is going on

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Well something fishy is going on

[maxume]

Newegg's legitimate business is way too big for them to actively attempt something this blatant, but it could still be a problem employee or whatever.

Newegg has responded

[Anonymous Coward]

... on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Newegg/status/10050889498 http://twitter.com/Newegg/status/10050906222 And others.

Re:Been caught out with faked good from Amazon too

[KDEWolf]

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.

Please Don't Restock This!

[Bruce Perens]

Twice recently I've found someone else's obsolete merchandise in boxes of purportedly new equipment from a hardware store. One was a 10-year-old smoke detector in a box for a different model, one was a non-combination arc-fault circuit breaker instead of the combination arc-fault model now required by electrical codes. In both cases I assume this was a previous return by someone defrauding the store. Both merchants were happy to take the merchandise back. In the Home Depot I had to tell the sales clerk "please don't restock this", and then she put a sticker on the box.

What bothers me is that in both cases, the bad merchandise could have compromised someone's safety.