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.

Well something fishy is going on

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Video Games

[PCM2]

Considering the shrinkwrap and the contents of the box, to this day I suspect a factory worker took home a little souveneir... but who knows?

Most retail stores have their own shrinkwrap supplies in the back somewhere. If a product comes back in good condition, they'll just wrap it up and put it back on the shelf. That's not to say I suspect any malfeasance on the part of the retailer. An employee could have stolen it without the company's knowledge, or the employee who accepted a return could have just re-wrapped it without opening the box to see if there really was a product in there. Or someone could have just as easily bought the product, swapped it out with the bolt to approximate the weight, then brought the box into their own retail job, where they used their boss's shrinkwrap machine to re-wrap it before returning it.

Newegg has responded

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Well something fishy is going on

[maxume]

Newegg's legitimate business is way too big for them to actively attempt something this blatant, but it could still be a problem employee or whatever.

Re:Display models?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Do not attribute to malice, what can be explained by stupidity"

Re:Dropship?

[RoFLKOPTr]

I believe they have 3 warehouses around the country.

give some benefit of doubt

[onyxruby]

chances are that newegg was similiarly duped, if they did this deliberately the cost to their business would be unrecoverable. went through something like this years ago with fake maxtor hard drives. turned out someone at the factory got a bunch of rejects, sent them to a shop and they had there firmware crudely rewritten along with professional labels. that is someone from the Western Digital factory.

Maxtor worked with me on it and they were able to tell by the circuit board who really made the hard drives. if memory serves they came from provantage and once I got provantage involved they replaced the entire lot of hard drives.

Re:Been caught out with faked good from Amazon too

[KDEWolf]

Sometimes they will even hack the FAT to make it look like a much larger drive, although obviously you will start getting errors if you try to write beyond its actual capacity... A lot of people get caught out by this because it takes them some time to fill the drive.

Yep, and most of the time even the retailer doesn't know about it. They buy from gray market, and that's what they get.

It's a worldwide huge issued already as you can see. [google.com]

There's even a "white list" of good USB sellers in eBay.

Re:Been a newegg.com customer for a long time

[maeka]

Except of course for the fact that you have to pay to ship the item back to them.

You've said that before in this thread - and you were just as wrong then as you are now.

Re:hey, Newegg

[maxume]

No sale, but here you go:

http://twitter.com/Newegg [twitter.com]

Re:There must be more out there

[Bill Dimm]

It is not profitable to go through this much trouble and expense for one or even a dozen units. There must be hundreds out there.

This post [hardforum.com] claims NewEgg got 300 fakes in a shipment of 2000 from a distributor.

Re:Dropship?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of my newegg orders from NE philly ship out of Edison, NJ. If it is UPS ship I often get it the next day with late afternoon orders. They also use DHL which hands off to USPS and always takes MUCH longer despite it only being used for little packages. One DHL package left EDISON NJ to be tendered to the USPS in Maryland! That routing makes no sense, but indicates several layer where nonsense could go on.

Re:From Intels Elbonian manufacturing plant

[threephaseboy]

Nice troll, but all of the Core i7 CPUs from Intel come from fabs in the US or Costa Rica. [insidecostarica.com]
And in Costa Rica, they pay almost double the local average wage [google.com].

Re:hey, Newegg

[ffflala]

Please metamod the troll mods on parent.

Why was parent modded troll? My post could have practically been a paraphrase Newegg customer service response tweeta. Which, btw, were as follows:

"Newegg is aware of a shipping error that occurred with certain recent orders of the Intel Core i7-920 CPU. After investigating the issue internally it appears one of our long term partners mistakenly shipped a small number of demo boxes instead of functional units. Our customer service team has already begun proactively reaching out to the affected customers. In line with our commitment to ensure total customer satisfaction... We are doing everything in our power to resolve the issue as soon as possible and with the least amount of inconvenience to our customers. We are aware of the issue, have investigated it and will resolve it to the full satisfaction of all customers."

Re:Video Games

[Jarik C-Bol]

gamestop does this itself. they open the boxes, take the disc, and keep it behind the counter. that way people don't open the boxes and steal the disc. when you buy it, they go into the drawer, find a disc, let you inspect it (for scratches and whatnot) then put it in the box for you.

Re:From Intels Elbonian manufacturing plant

[cheesybagel]

The parent is actually sorta right. Usually the place where a chip is manufactured and assembled are different. By manufacturing I mean actually doing lithography on the silicon and creating the chip. This is mostly automated and you do not need a lot of people to do it. There are also bans against exporting high-end lithography machine tools to non-allied countries (including China). Assembly usually consists of lining up the package with the chip so the pins match. Lining up is IIRC a highly labor intensive process, done by hand, and is usually done in countries where salaries are low. e.g. AMD does their assembly in Malaysia. Even China is probably too expensive.

Re:From Intels Elbonian manufacturing plant

[threephaseboy]

In case you're being serious, I assumed OP was using this definition [urbandictionary.com] (does anybody here NOT know the dilbert reference?)

Elbonia is the collective name for all places outside of the United States of America and can be considered to be a nation of its own.

Re:asian counterfeits?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chances are a substantial number of real CPUs were stolen and replaced with these fakes.

Also possible: someone wanted to pad the numbers of a shipment. "Sure, we may only have 9,000 chips, but we need to send 10,000"

Re:Reputation

[ChrisMaple]

It's been 10 years since I lived near Fry's, but back then they had a reputation for putting stuff returned as defective back on the shelves untested. Fry's is a lot of fun and has some good deals, but it's strictly buyer beware.

Please Don't Restock This!

[Bruce Perens]

Twice recently I've found someone else's obsolete merchandise in boxes of purportedly new equipment from a hardware store. One was a 10-year-old smoke detector in a box for a different model, one was a non-combination arc-fault circuit breaker instead of the combination arc-fault model now required by electrical codes. In both cases I assume this was a previous return by someone defrauding the store. Both merchants were happy to take the merchandise back. In the Home Depot I had to tell the sales clerk "please don't restock this", and then she put a sticker on the box.

What bothers me is that in both cases, the bad merchandise could have compromised someone's safety.

Re:Dropship?

[Donniedarkness]

I can happily say that one is in Memphis, TN. Gotta love getting things next-day. :)

Re:Video Game

[paeanblack]

Of course, you don't discover that until you get home, when it's too late.

It's never too late. If you got ripped off by a store, take that product back and bitch. It's not a court of law, you don't need to have proof that you are right. Just stand your ground, and they will cave. The more expensive the item, the longer they will argue with you, but you'll win in the end. It is simply not worth the money to argue with you.

However, don't make it personal. Don't blame anybody specifically. Don't piss anyone off. You want the manager to be able to walk away happy that he/she made a rational and correct cost-benefit decision (i.e. feeling like a winner)