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Some Newegg Customers Received Fake Intel Core i7s

Posted by kdawson on from the zero-gigahertz dept.

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.

12 of 447 comments (clear)

  1. Not me! by Captain+Splendid · · Score: 5, Funny

    I buy AMD!

    --
    Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
    1. Re:Not me! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      If you bought Intel, you might have had a first post.

  2. Well something fishy is going on by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Newegg has responded by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    1. Re:Newegg has responded by Captain+Spam · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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? :-)

      --
      Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
  4. easy way to tell a fake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  5. asian counterfeits? by unix_geek_512 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Reputation by sconeu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  7. My swap meet story by RickRussellTX · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:Video Games by Yvan256 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  9. Fake processor? You were lucky. by cvtan · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  10. It's not the first time for NewEgg by jgreco · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.