NewEgg Confirms Shipping Fake Core i7s

adeelarshad82 writes "After originally rejecting the story, online retailer NewEgg confirmed that a shipment of Core i7s were indeed fake, and apologized for the affair. NewEgg has also broken off its relationship with IPEX, the supplier of the phony lot. The retailer said that it has already contacted affected customers and would continue to reach out and replace the counterfeit parts. We discussed the fake Core i7s over the weekend."

Comments

Counterfits are everywhere

[colin_faber]

Want to find even more? Try buying some flash on ebay sometime.

Re:Counterfits are everywhere

[ILuvRamen]

This isn't memory chips. This is high end, new intel processors. I've never heard of someone faking processors ever. It just seems completely insane. I can't wait to find out who made these and where and how they ended up "in the line" to newegg. It probably wasn't the intel factory and nobody at newegg's supplier would be stupid enough to purposely try and rip them off with something that would so obviously get caught. That's a great way to destroy your own business! So that begs the question...how many damn people get these processors on the way from Intel to Newegg? What a waste of time and money if it's anything but Intel -> distrubutor -> Newegg. I especially don't want to pay an extra $20 for my processor to have it shipped to 8 different people first, one of which decided it was a good idea to add in or swap out some fakes. Time to cut out the middleman!

Re:Counterfits are everywhere

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What is interesting about this case is that the processors in question were totally fake, just rather crude physical models of processors.

Much more common in tech related gear is partial fakery. The classic flash memory trick is 256MB(or whatever the value) of actual flash(and probably bottom bin stuff, at that) with the formatting or firmware claiming to be 4GB(or whatever the larger value) and doing various things certain to make the customer sad when you write more than 256MB to the device. If you get lucky, you'll get an actual 4GB of bottom-bin crap, with an "OMG LExar high speed!!11!" sticker on it.

With CPUs, basically no counterfeiters have the technical capability to produce plausible fakes from scratch for less than intel or AMD can produce the genuine article. However, there is a long history of selling overclocked and remarked low-end parts as higher end ones. That has become more difficult these days(with multipliers locked on all but the most expensive chips, you really can't overclock without the connivance of the motherboard. Intel's fancy new power-control microcontroller probably makes it even trickier). However, there is a cute way of getting around that: Modifying CPUs is hard and expensive. You need careful technique and serious rework kit. Basically not worth it. Modifying a motherboard's BIOS just a bit, to change the values that it reports for certain processor related parameters and maybe does some silent overclocking, is within the reach of a few decent software/firmware engineers. Thus you do sometimes see for sale(usually aimed at unscrupulous small computer shops, rather than retail users, CPU + motherboard combos consisting of a cheap CPU(bottom of whatever the range is at the moment) and a none-too-exciting motherboard with a BIOS hacked to claim, in all visible ways, that the CPU it is paired with is actually a much faster and more expensive unit.

Frankly, I much prefer complete fakes. They are a nuisance, certainly; but they are immediately obvious on inspection. The dangerous fakes are the ones of commodities where quality and realness are matters of degree, rather than binaries. Real/Visibly just a crude model is easy. 4GB/512MB+firmware lies can easily take some data loss to discover. Real/cheap under-specced capacitors were used, resulting in a higher 3 year failure rate can take ages to diagnose. Real/diluted to 25% of its actual dose and sold as real can get people killed and encourage drug resistance in various nasty pathogens.

Re:NewEgg handled it well,

[Anonymous Coward]

True, that's an amazing amount of professionalism and quick action on their part. Pity shame that for some Slashdot readers, that won't be enough, and they won't be happy until they see Newegg executives' heads on pikes, even if it wasn't their fault. Mmm, tasty, frothy bile...

Re:New Egg

[Etrias]

I've bought a lot of stuff from Newegg and they've been really good. They often get good marks for their RMA policy and returns on DOA equipment. Looks like to me they took the right steps here including stopping the relationship with the supplier who gave them the phony i7s and working to replace the ones that went out. There's nothing here that would prevent me from shopping with them again.

Re:Glad

[Konster]

Welcome to the entitlement mindset.

Newegg is doing their share by rush shipping replacements. This whole affair isn't their fault and they got on top of the situation quickly enough, what more do you expect?

Re:fake fakes?

[tnk1]

Newegg has to track outgoing inventory to prevent internal theft, so it is a good bet they probably associated an inventory item with an outgoing order. So, if they know which order the customer is returning, they can probably trace it back to the original supplier in some manner. If they have a good tracking system, they could probably bring up that detail immediately.

Re:D&H Distributing

[bfagan]

This is exactly why trustworthy reporting outlets try to verify sources before reporting as fact. However, this becomes difficult in this time of now, faster, beat the other guy, instant publishing.

Re:NewEgg handled it well,

[noidentity]

Hell, I've never ordered from NewEgg, but they're the first place I go for reviews, and to leave my own reviews of products. I haven't found any other "review" site that isn't mostly ad-laden crap and pages with the title "Reviews of ", only to be empty and say "Be the first to review !".

Re:Glad

[Thaelon]

They vetted the supplier.

It turns out they did a bad job of it.

It's their responsibility because the items were sold on their site.

Now, making good on their fuckup isn't the entitlement mindset, it's excellent, self-serving business sense. Allow me to explain, it's really quite simple:

You can buy a customer for life far cheaper than you can think by simply owning up to the problem, fixing it, then going beyond that.

It could be as cheap, and as easy as free overnight/cross shipping of the replacements. You absolutely lose money on the spot. But you're very likely to see the customer again. It's simply thinking long term.

That kind of service will get noticed and will bring people back next time because they know that even if shit goes wrong, they'll be well taken care of.

It's the same reasoning why most of my video cards are eVGA. Their customer service to my friends has been so stellar I know I'll be taken care of if their shit breaks. Yes, I wrote that correctly, I've never even had to deal with their customer service, yet they're my first choice for video cards. All because of stellar service they gave two of my friends. For a paltry $300 or so they bought three repeat customers. It's just another form of investment, and I'm living proof that it works. Hell, I just gave them great PR, and I hate PR.

Re:Lost customer

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd seriously lose faith in a company that blows everyone else away in customer service because of this one thing? Are you serious? So it doesn't matter that they exchanged the fakes and bent over backwards to fix the problem?

Grow the hell up and come back to reality. This entitled generation crap is beyond annoying, expecting everyone and everything to be absolutely perfect and cater to your every need and the second they don't then BAM they're horrible and evil.

Re:New Egg

[jim_v2000]

When Paypal works for everyone else who uses Newegg, but not you...the problem is probably not with Newegg.

Re:Glad Newegg confirmed they're fake!

[petermgreen]

They were leaning on that "oh, our bad, we got some 'demo units' by mistake" excuse pretty hard.
My guess is they were just passing on what thier supplier had told them until they could prove otherwise.

It's kind of a difficult position to be in. Newegg probablly didn't want to lie but they probablly didn't want to be publically seen as doubting thier suppliers either until they could prove that the supplier was indeed shipping fakes.

Re:Glad Newegg confirmed they're fake!

[Mr. Freeman]

MARKETING demos, not engineering demos.

The marketing team doesn't need to pull out the processor, install the HSF, etc.
They just have to look at the box and see if the packaging is appealing. You don't need functional equipment for that, you don't even need dead equipment for that, you just need something that looks like the product.