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

asian counterfeits?

[unix_geek_512]

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.

Reputation

[sconeu]

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.

Re:Newegg has responded

[Captain Spam]

It's called "diplomacy" and "dodging potential legal charges". Yes, a statement like that, given what people are saying, sounds ridiculous and utterly absurd to us, but what are you expecting them to say on official or semi-official channels? "After investigating the issue internally, it appears one of our long-term partners are fucking retards who thought they could get away with blatant fraud"? Saying anything like that would get them run up on slander in a heartbeat. Even implying it was anything remotely illegal on their distributors' ends could get them in legal hot water. Even if they could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was willfully fraudulent and a company-wide conspiracy at the distributor to screw over Newegg and its customers, they'd still have legal fees and time wasted to deal with it. Sorry, man; that's the legal system for you.

And after all is said and done, that distributor, who may have served them well for years and was suffering a single isolated incident at the time, wouldn't be so eager to continue doing business with Newegg, costing them a chunk of their supply chain. Not to mention the PR disaster that would result as cooler-headed customers would start to wonder what's going on with a company that flies off the handle and calls out their partners publicly like that.

Rather, the better answer would be to appear as diplomatic as possible in official channels, not assign blame directly, offer refunds or exchanges as customers demand, and quietly drop the distributor under breach of contract grounds if Newegg finds reason not to trust their cheating asses any more. Demanding any more from them is just letting petty bitterness boil over.

And alternatively, how much more detail were you expecting them to give in one tweet? :-)