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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."
Want to find even more? Try buying some flash on ebay sometime.
- Yahoo Serious, Young Einstein
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It was a little up in the air there for awhile!
Newegg were on top of this pretty early.
They never denied there being a problem although they took a day to figure out what was happening.
They have already apologized, announced they are sending out replacements and announced they are getting a new distributor a couple of days ago.
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.
Counterfeit Intel CPU Saga Comes to a Close
At no time did HardOCP speculate as to what company was supplying the counterfeit processors to Newegg. Our source that informed us of the supplier being D&H Distributing came from within Newegg's organization. We belived the information to be accurate and reported it to our readers. Newegg is stating that IPEX shipped it the counterfeit processors. I am not sure as to why we would get conflicting information, and we will further investigate that.
At this time we offer our apologies to D&H Distributing for naming it as the supplying distributor. HardOCP was simply reporting the information that we believed to be accurate. We would NEVER "speculate" on something of this nature, as there is NOTHING for us to gain by misinforming our readers. We will be investigating further as to why we were misinformed on this detail.
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?
They acknowledged that they had shipped non functional units on Friday:
http://twitter.com/Newegg/status/10050889498
They probably would have done better to say less, but they never denied the issue entirely.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
According to that article Newegg did not threaten to sue, Newegg's supplier did.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
The CONTRACTUAL entitlement mindset is a VERY good thing. Commerce depends on it.
Parent is naive. Corporations will try ANY legal argument to get money from consumers and the government. The idea that a citizen should foreswear such BS entitlement arguments while they are exploited by corporations that freely make (and benefit from) them is ridiculous and absurd.
That wasn't NewEgg, one of their suppliers (not the culprit) threatened to sue.
Read the article you linked. It's the distributor D&H that these sites accused without evidence and as such it was the D&H lawyers that sent the cease and desist. As it turns out it was a completely different distributor (IPEX).
"A company called D&H Distributing doesn’t consider it legitimate for the free press took umbrage to this. In fact, the legal beagles over at D&H Distributing got so worked up over the horrifying gall and chutzpah of Icrontic and HardOCP for daring to ask a question that the company slapped both publications with a “cease and desist” order.
Sent by the lawyers representing D&H, Creim Macias Koenig & Frey, it reads in part..."
Your link says that D&H, not Newegg threatened legal action.
Considering that D&H did not sell the fakes to Newegg, well, they are justifiably upset that people are wrongfully blaming them.
IANAL, so I don't know if they have an actionable complaint, but your link doesn't show a Newegg legal threat, and, again, D&H is understandably pissed off that they were blamed when they had nothing to do with it.
If IPEX was tossed out, I'm guessing it was someone at IPEX who was swapping processors out for dummies (for sale elsewhere, I assume) and then sending the fakes to Newegg.
Welcome to the entitlement mindset.
And rightfully so.
Did you even read that article you linked to? It says that the legal threats came from a company called D&H Distributing that the sites claim sold the counterfeit equipment to Newegg:
In fact, the legal beagles over at D&H Distributing got so worked up over the horrifying gall and chutzpah of Icrontic and HardOCP for daring to ask a question that the company slapped both publications with a “cease and desist” order.
Sent by the lawyers representing D&H, Creim Macias Koenig & Frey, it reads in part:
“It has recently been brought to our attention that you are responsible for publishing on the internet, and specifically on your websites, untrue statements respecting allegedly counterfeit Intel Core i7 processors which you allege were sold to Newegg by D&H.
“This letter places you on notice that these statements are false. You have no basis for publishing these false and malicious statements about D & H. These false allegations are defamatory and disparaging to D&H”s business and business relations and have caused grave and irreparable damage to our client.”
Emphasis mine.
That article also mentions that Newegg had already started issuing replacements and they were just trying to figure out where those chips came from:
Tech community site, Icrontic, picked up the HardOCP story and noted that Newegg had shipped replacements for the fake CPUs quickly to affected customers and that both the e-tailer and Intel were in the process of investigating where the chips came from.
Emphasis mine.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Maybe as compensation they can send a T-shirt that says "NewEgg sent me a counterfeit Intel processor and all I got was this stupid T-shirt".
I get why Intel doesn't want to *retail* them, but what's the point of a wholesaler when you have a retail distributor as huge as Newegg?
And the same is true of other products sold via other retailers.
It almost seems like "we/they" put up with a needless set of middlemen who only mark stuff up.
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?s=d01ac05d09e4f3d3bfb4364cdbc5d2af&p=1035432866&postcount=927
From [H] Forums:
I just want to clear up something Paul keeps bringing up in this thread: Ipex is a division of ASI. Ipex isn't ASI.
Full disclosure: I worked for ASI for some time back in the 90's (God, I feel old).
ASI is a legit Intel distributor (one of only a small handful) and is one of Newegg's biggest sources for Intel CPU's. Ipex, on the other hand, is the division that deals in gray market CPU's, RAM, etc.
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.
Question everything
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.
I'm not so sure it was all about a PR stunt. The original thread had quite a few response pointing out the defamation laws that could have been used against them if they had moved too quickly to out a supplier. I'm sure the legal team had a few days of hard work making sure they were (reasonably) safe from a suit before they allowed any statement out that named names.
When Paypal works for everyone else who uses Newegg, but not you...the problem is probably not with Newegg.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Except that NewEgg didn't send any cease and desists. They were sent by the distributor who shipped the units.
Actually the cease and desists were sent by a different distributer who was incorrectly named as the culprit and was justifiably upset. The cease and desist letters by D&H were appropriate, and their claims that they were being falsely accused were accurate.
I think Kyle at HardOCP was honestly misinformed, but he didn't exactly handle if well. He accused Newegg of being dishonest and trying to cover things up. He appologizes to D&H but defends himself by saying "We would NEVER "speculate" on something of this nature, as there is NOTHING for us to gain by misinforming our readers." However, he never gave Newegg the same benefit of the doubt he claims he deserves. He adamantly accused Newegg of a cover-up when they originally relayed IPEX's story about demo processors. Newegg had no more to gain by lying than HardOCP did.
Kyle has been around a long time and should know better. He owes Newegg one hell of a public appology, and hopefully after a little more thought he will man up and make that appology.