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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.
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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
That's a very interesting case of customer service via twitter.
http://twitter.com/Newegg/
Looks pretty much like it's replacing a contact number. Contact support and complain to your friends at the same time!
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.
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".'
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.
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.
Once, during the original Pentium counterfeiting spree (where they'd grind down the ceramic top and re-screen the labels), I was at the Dayton Hamvention.
There was a vendor there that I knew, and trusted, and had bought RAM and CPUs and other commodity silicon from in the past, all of which worked fine.
He was selling counterfeit Pentiums. But they were marked as such. They were cheaper than the genuine product, and he was happy to explain to people what had happened to them. Stuff like "These were all probably Pentium 100's, but they've all checked out at 133, and now they're just marked as such."
And: "We've got real P133's here for you to buy, too."
And he'd explain the difference, and how to tell (the ceramic wasn't as smooth as the real article, for instance).
I stood and watched people at that booth for some time: Some folks, knowingly, bought the counterfeits. Some folks bought the genuine ones. Nobody really seemed to be scared away by the concept or the vendor, though, probably because of his openness, honesty, and willingness to teach.
In retrospect, it looked a whole lot more like the retail overclocking scene does today, than it did of someone trying to cheat someone else.
Kid-proof tablet..
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!