https://www.tomshardware.com/news/buyer-receives-fake-core-i9-13900k-with-swapped-ihs-off-amazon
The dark side of online CPU shopping
It's almost like the writing on the wall was trying to tell us something! Amazon is a bloated poorly self-regulated market with a low barrier to entry that prioritizes convenience over quality, while obfuscating the truth of the seller you do business with.
I sincerely can’t figure out how to use Amazon anymore and I’m very tech literate. Top that off with their labor practices literally being criminal and you have a spicy pizza pie.
It takes a bit of effort to avoid amazon, and it does cost a bit more in money and convenience, but it is possible to not buy from them.
(It's virtually impossible not to use their web services though unless you are a member of an uncontacted tribe in the, you guessed it, Amazon jungle).
I like when you pay extra to avoid them, and the other site just orders from Amazon anyway and has it shipped to you.
It takes a bit of effort to avoid amazon, and it does cost a bit more in money and convenience, but it is possible to not buy from them.
Ha, here in Austria the government has effectively made it impossible for small vendors to sell their stuff. Amazon is pretty much all that's left.
It's a new packaging law. Every non-Austrian merchant who wants to ship goods to Austria has to have a local notary acting as a representative who has to register the packaging used for shipments with the local authorities and is personally held liable for this. There are local notaries that offer this service for foreign merchants for about €800 per year. However, Austria is such a small market that this most likely eats up all of the revenue from Austrian customers for small merchants, so most just stopped shipping to the country. Of course, large merchants like Amazon easily can handle that fee.
That would go against the EU rules about Free Movement of people and goods (because it treats sellers from other countries differently from austrian sellers).
Maybe it only applies to sellers from outside the EU?!
It also affects merchants from inside the EU. People here are pretty sure that it does violate Free Movement, but since those proceedings for violations can take a few years, for now we’re stuck with it.
In 2025 the EU wants to introduce a similar system for the whole Union, but unified (so one representative for the whole EU). When that comes, the Austrian system will probably be disbanded, and since the EU is significant enough of a trading partner, the whole issue will probably be fixed. However, until then we're stuck with a law-enforced Amazon monopoly.
an uncontacted tribe in the, you guessed it, Amazon jungle
Can you believe they're so powerful they have bought a jungle with uncontacted tribes in it?
(/s)
I can't figure out how they facilitate fraud and violate consumer laws, en mass, and nothing's been done about it... I mean, apart from the blatant capitalist oligarchies we live in.
Because we have a soft spot for monopsony for some reason. Probably because it's how you get the crazy ROI that gave us billionaires... Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon - all of them were able to become the monsters that they are by controlling the link between buyers and sellers
I second the other commenter just stop using it. I haven't order anything from Amazon for the better half of a decade. There's no product worth buying that can't be found off Amazon.
You have no duty to reward poor practices with your business.
Not only that, but the seller you do business with isn't necessarily the one supplying your product. Items are binned together based on their barcode, all sellers' items end up in the same bin, so legit sellers end up delivering counterfeits and counterfeiters end up selling legit products.
Not always, some warehouses (like the one I used to be at) stow products based off size. For example, could have RAM, ball point pens, phone cases, chocolate bars and everything else that fits into a small pull out cubby on a shelf shoved into one space.
So the stower scans the item, then scans the space on the shelf space they think they can fit it in. The Picker who bundles orders together is given the task to find the RAM you ordered. They are told it's in X aisle in X cubby. They have to dig through the most random garbage that is shoved into this space because the stower before is given like 2 minutes per item to find space.
Sometimes just to keep their efficiency numbers up the stower will scan the item, scan the space, and never put the item on the shelf bc space was limited. So that item ends up in an adjacent space that they eventually found room for the item and the picker is unaware so they may just have scanned whatever item was closest they could get away with and kept it moving so they don't get backed up. It was a mess of a way to do things.
You're talking about physical bins whereas the comment above I beleive meant database bins. There's a legit item in aisle x bin x while there's a counterfeit item in aisle y bin y. By binning them together in the database, the pickers aren't sent to x/x just because it matches the seller. Instead, they're sent to whichever is closest on their route.
Yeah, I recently ordered something on AliExpress and noticed that I felt less suspicious about their listings than I usually feel when I browse Amazon.
Although watch out for extreme markups. Some of the junk you buy a lot of, you can get for a min wholesale price straight on Ali regular.
I've seen the same item (same pictures etc) on Alibaba, AliExpress and Amazon, each time with a 100-200% markup. It's insane how the exact same item is $10 shipped from AliX but $30 on Amazon. Obviously the greater trust in Amazon vs AliX allows for greater markup when selling on that platform.
I bought 6 pairs of ear buds from Ali express. 2 of them aren't great, cheap sound, bad charge, etc. The other 4 are nice, not quite as good as my wife's airpods, but I can't really tell without doing a side by side. A few are airpod design knock off, one set are loop buds, the other are nicer gel plugs. All of that cost me $38 shipped, and there is no rhyme or reason to the pricing. The best pair was $7, the worst $8, there is a $3 pair I really like and keep as a backup at work. I look at any of those on Amazon and the cheapest is $30 LOL.
Haha, and you know that Amazon seller is either the same AliX seller or some idiot who bought a book on how drop shipping can make them millions.
AliX can be amazing quality sometimes but like Yahoo Japan you need your hand held at bit. I use AliX for watches and watch parts, but use reputable Youtubers to crossref the stores and parts. I also don't buy from stores that have no photos in reviews etc. It can take me an hour or two to find the right store for a $2 part, but I know that in 2 weeks I'll have the correct part etc rather than junk. I haven't tried them for electronics, but those retro Gameboy emulators are tempting.
Yahoo Japan
Can you elaborate?
Retro Gameboy emulators
How much are they going for? That's a tempting gift idea I know for someone
Amazon turned out really weird. I feel like the idea of Amazon should be consolidating reputable retailers together, but they decided to open the floodgates to random people and now it's little better than wish.com. Maybe they should split the site up and push all the random sellers onto a different platform.
I trust nothing on there anymore, it is very difficult to wade through the crap. All I want is a 3m HDMI 2.1 cable and I don't believe what I'm getting.
It's like chinavasion but with better marketing.
Hey man, I've got your cable right here: 10m 5m 3m 2m 1m HDMI 1.4 2.0 2.1 cable male female for Xbox 360 One Series S X PS3 PS4 PS5 Wii U Switch Apple PC iPhone iPad 4K 4:4:4 16:9 1080p 60Hz 120Hz.
It'd worse than things like Temu. With that you just know you're buying cheap knockoffs with let's say questionable quality. On Amazon, you don't know what quality you're getting, for a worse price, and even worse delivery times (my last purchase from Amazon took 2 months to deliver. For a book!).
Amazon has basically become a delivery company with a shop front and no responsibility.
Their selling fees are utterly incomprehensible, but their calculator reckons you'll get about half the money for a £18 item and about 60% of it for a £45 item.
I feel like for that sort of cut, Amazon should be taking full responsibility for the fire hazard bullshit available from them.
Amazon, Uber, Deliveroo, etc are just leeches.
Have you had any issues, I'm seeing ridiculously long cables that I didn't think we're commercially available like 15m 48gbps HDMI which I thought was above the length maximum
Is it fiber or copper? Copper is probably not going to get you that far, but fiber can supposedly still deliver a decent signal at up to 60m.
I don't understand, wouldn't the cable need to be copper to be a HDMI? If it was fiber you'd need something to convert the signal back to electrical from optical before the TV no?
There are optical HDMI cables with much longer maximum lengths than passive copper cables. I assume the electrical - optical conversion is done in the plug itself.
That is unbelievable, I never knew this. I can't believe there is a terminal in the jack allowing for the conversion it's really impressive.
Bought some plant stuff for the wifes bday and the company name on Amazon was XXXtenacion...wtf does that even mean? Why xxx? I don't know, but there are thousands of these ai generated/poorly translated brandings going on.
I prefer fleaBay these days. I mostly know what I’m getting whether it be someone’s personal item or a mass produced product. I feel like I have better control. Not a lot, but more. I also use B&H for tech stuff.
Yep, just bought a new pixel directly from the Google store on Amazon. They shipped me a refurbished one that was carrier locked to Verizon. It's been 3 weeks since I shipped it back and they still haven't checked it in n for a refund. Prob never buying anything worth more 200 bucks from them again.
Bet it wasn't google, it was something 'xingwang productions' calling themselves google.
Raspberry pi had loads of these during the shortage (still does, I think).. the listing has 'Raspberry Pi model 4B' and 'Visit the raspberry pi store' and '#1 best seller' and you dig a little and find it's a reseller who's shifting at a markup.
Amazon do nothing to prevent companies masquerading as others.
The problem is Amazon puts everything with the same SKU in the same bin. So your "xingwang productions" Pixel phones are in the same place as the official "Google Store" stuff.
I basically stopped buying on Amazon unless there's no other way to get what I want (or it doesn't matter that much) because of this. Definitely not touching any food, skin cream, etc from there or expensive electronics.
I am pretty sure they already stopped doing that for a long time. I mean mistake might still happen but I do not think they do that anymore.
See, this is weird. Normally I get a refund the moment I drop it off at UPS/Kohls/USPS. They don’t even wait for the item to actually reach their warehouse most of the time. This includes a $4k laptop with a DOA thunderbolt port.
That had been my prior experience as well. I've bought and returned several more expensive items in the past, but I think they've made some recent changes to their return policy. Now they're not returning funds for expensive items until they've checked it in.
I've seen so many Amazon drop ship listings on ebay. They don't even use different pictures.
I just got straight to the source on Ali for all my chinesium stuff, although if you don't want to wade through the express it can be a chore. And express vendors can be as expensive as Amazon.
Ebays not bad, especially for used gizmos. And anything important I just get it from a legitimate retailer.
It really is. On eBay the seller has a rating. On Amazon the item has a rating. You're just sort of randomly buying the thing you want and hope to get a good seller.
I love how you people go full on crazy when these stories come out.
Yeah, it is definitely just a step away from wish 🙄
For a lot of it its a couple of steps away from ali express atleast. So much so that most of it is just ali express but 10 times more expensive with next day delivery.
Hey man I've had quality knockoffs from Wish. Wish is great if it's not much and you wanna gamble a little.
But, so is Amazon, now. Better return policy, but you pay full price so the gamble is way worse.
I ordered four m.2 chips for a raid and one of them was not like the others. Clearly a diff brand chip with a sticker transferred to it. Had I not bought multiple chips I might not have caught on.
Fuck amazon for anything of value. I now use it only for things like books and cat litter.
I now use it only for things like books
Regarding that ... I recently bought a hefty biography on Oppenheimer - should have had more than 500 pages, great reviews. What arrived was a 50-page small format booklet. Not even books are a "safe buy" on Amazon.
I didn't check. I sent it right back. It looks like it was some bait and switch scheme, when I received the book I checked the amazon page and there were many other new complaints about this exact thing.
Wow. I thought you were heading towards it being self-published with fake accreditation or something. Did not expect this.
Amazon damaged their brand name once they started acting like a third-party marketplace. Now it's basically almost like ebay.
Except worse because they mix inventory so it's easier for sellers to get away with scams
I don't buy books from them any longer because their packaging is so poor that most of the time books arrive to me damaged from being tossed into a too large box for shipping.
Ha! The put my copy of It's OK to be Angry About Capitalism in a huge box with a 40lbs box of cat litter. The book got compressed like an accordion.
I stopped buying electronics on Amazon after getting bricks instead of a GPU for my PC and they treated me like shit when I went to return it. I filed a complaint with the state about the fraud and their unwillingness to correct it. Complaint didn’t do shit but I was pissed. Now the only stuff I buy on Amazon is random household items and stuff for the kids that’s under 100 bucks.
B&H seems to be the best bet since Newegg went down the drain. I'd always gone to them for camera gear and never had issues. I'll be going to them for electronics from now on.
Just be aware of their return policy, it’s not quite as no-questions as Amazon usually is. But it’s serviceable.
But it isn’t an unreasonable policy or anything I think. They’ve also price matched their own price for me after a week or two which seemed very customer oriented. No complaints and I’ve used them for a few years now.
They are like the anti Amazon in terms of shipping for religious reasons, given their observance of shabbos they don't ship on Saturdays at all. Good to know that their warehouse staff has a weekend day off to rest.
Yeah theyve been around for a long time for media stuff specifically, will have to check it out for electronics in general.
Ever heard of MicroCenter? There's only a few but if you live nearish one, go check them out. It's like a toy store for tech nerds.
I am aware of them, but am nowhere near one unfortunately. Not much locally. The nearest thing they’ve had like that was Fry’s Electronics. Could buy anything there, but maybe not the best price. They’re gone now too.
Don't use B & H. They have had numerous discrimination lawsuits filed against them and don't seem to be changing their behavior. It's just a different kind of evil than Amazon.
that is the full name lol, just look up that.
edit: technically the url is bhphotovideo.com but asking what b&h means is like asking what HP means. it may technically mean something, but no one needs to know it.
Wasn't HP branded Hewlett Packard for ages ? Unless you're talking about HP sauce which name is a complete mystery
I thought HP Sauce referred to the Harry Potter franchise, which is a book about a UK orphaned teenager living with oppressive stepparents discovering the secret ingredient to making a delicious dipping sauce.
yup, was looking for the url. thanks. wouldn't have guessed that it included "photo video".
I have a microcenter. I only go there for PV
I only buy random cheap shit I can't find anywhere else. Nothing of substance.
Just got a new watch. Best Buy. Why risk some bullshit knockoff or return from them? Amazon is trash. Basically the American ali express and all the negatives with it
Microcenter is my go to. I live about 45 minutes from one but any PC parts that are expensive I get there, I also open in store to check for GPUs that were returned to the store to make sure someone didn’t swap out with a cheaper part. I don’t build too often so I don’t make my way over there too often.
Is buying returned products a comming thing? Does not the store check that what you returned is what is actually supposed to be before giving you your money back?
I’ve definitely got a few things at Microcenter that were obvious repackages. I bought a cpu once to find the pins covered in thermal paste. Clearly someone made a bad choice and just returned it. I believe for the most part their returned items are sold at a discount after a review but people repackage things well and some get away with returning something as unopened. If I’m spending 150 or more I just open in store to just in case I find something odd I can return it and they never question it because I never left.
I've been getting some PC peripherals from GameStop's site lately since Amazon's lack of reliability has me unwilling to trust them for electronics
I didn't realize how many issues there were with Amazon, I've never had a problem, guess I've been lucky. Unfortunately, while there is finally a microcenter being built in Charlotte, it's not going to be open for a few years. In the meantime, what I can't get at eBay is still easy to get at Amazon, and return it if it's a fake.
Edit: nevermind, microcenter in Charlotte is slated to open by early 2024!!
The state AGs are slow on complaints but next time reach for the CFPB, they don’t mess around and you’ll get a call from a human (from Amazon) in a short amount of time.
I spent hours on hold with a company (not Amazon) and they kept giving me the run around. After filing a complaint I got a call back in less than 2 days by someone who immediately fixed the issue.
Thanks for the heads up. I've been dealing with a gym membership that got transferred to a different gym without any notification to us and no way to cancel the contract.
One thing I noticed, about a third of the time they have lower prices for Legos compared to the official Lego site. I buy a bunch of Legos for my kids and been wondering about this. Are they very clever frauds or do they just have a better logistics system?
Manufacturers who sell both directly and via retail usually offer lower prices to retailers (and usually don't disclose those prices publicly), asking the retailers to sell at a suggested price (MSRP, often same as the direct sales price). So if you buy direct the manufacturer has a notably higher profit margin.
Big retailers can often get volume pricing which allows them to keep the prices even lower (if they're willing to reduce profit margins - and yes they do need good logistics to pull this off). Typically the retailers try to make up for the lower margin in volume of sales (and/or by convincing you to buy other higher margin stuff from them too), like when an electronics store selling you an iPhone tries to sell you insurance and accessories to increase their margin since that range of phones are low margin items.
Fraudulent parts on Amazon is a mix clever and just plain dumb I got bricks instead of a GPU. For work I’ve gotten a handful of hard to notice frauds. We got some Samsung SSDs the older sata drives not NVMe. One was a different shade of black and looked altered. It had the guts of a USB drive with a usb to sata homebrew conversion. That one Amazon took back no questions but it was a company purchase so they probably treat those differently.
For Legos if they were frauds I would imagine it would be noticeable. It’s probably a discount because of the volume they purchase.
If you buy legos often I’ve had some good luck going to goodwill stores and getting them super cheap. It’s not going to be a set. Usually it’s mixed pieces in a vacuum sealed bag or bin if there are a lot.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The pricing didn't raise any red flags since the user paid close to MSRP for the 24-core chip.
Switching the IHS on a cheap chip to sell it as a higher-tier SKU is the oldest tactic in the playbook.
There are many ways to spot a fake processor; however, the typical consumer doesn't check the product's authenticity.
In the Redditor's case, he bought the phony Core i9-13900K in April and evidently hasn't noticed that he was scammed until now.
The fraudster only receives a $180 profit from the operation, leading to a discussion among Redditors on the genuineness of the case.
The fact that you're buying a product from a big retailer, such as Amazon or Newegg, can sometimes give you a certain level of confidence.
The original article contains 416 words, the summary contains 126 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
If you're building systems, I would assume you're the kind of person that knows how they work.
The system tells you what CPU it has on boot.
The BIOS tells you what CPU you have.
MemTest86 would have told you what CPU you had when you tested it after assembling your system.
Windows tells you what you have in Settings > About and Task Manager.
Apps like CPU-Z have been downloaded a billion times and tell you what CPU you have.
Geekbench would have told you what CPU you have and how it performs.
The article mentions someone paying a bunch for a specific CPU back in April, but then never bothered actually checking it until recently... What the CPU had written on it is meaningless. I couldn't even tell you what my current CPU looked like before I installed it. It could have said Pentium 2 or 486SX or Core i-13. What mattered was that it physically fit, the system booted, and my software said "yup, this is what you paid for."
The issue is if it never occurred to you that you might have been scammed you might not ever think to look.
I built my first computer last year, with all NiB internals, my main concerns when assembling it was does it work. If it underperformed (due to a bootleg part) I might not have been able to appreciate due to a lack of reference point.
This kind of practice is perfect for targeting the person using PC part picker to build a computer without an indepth knowledge or a relative buying it as a gift for someone else.
Considering how expensive individual components can be, it’s always a good idea to ensure you got the exact model you paid for while there’s still a chance to return it or report fraud to your credit card company. Even with NiB items mistakes can be made and the wrong item could be shipped out.
“Trust, but verify”
Would it not be possible to fake most of those by spoofing the model the CPU reports, like what happens with GPUs?
Theoretically possible? Yes, of course. Well beyond the ability of most people including those that print a different model number on the heat shroud? Also yes
Yes, and to be more clear, in order to do something like this, you'd need to manufacture a chip to do so. It doesn't have to be a full CPU, but it does need to intercept any signal looking for the id and pass the rest to the real CPU you're using. If there's any cryptography involved, the problem becomes NP hard to solve unless you can get ahold of a private key, but then you might need to intercept even more signals to keep everything coherent.
And you need to solve any problems involved in having two chips (or more) work together seemlessly. And if you want to fit it on one package, now you need to make a custom one that routes the pins as you need them to be, when the current design already tries to make optimal use of the space. If you could do this, you could probably make more money working with one or more chip makers legitimately.
Odds are all of this will be more expensive than the difference between the price of the high end chip you're pretending to be and the low end chip you're really using. Unless you can sell them at a scale that will attract the attention of the companies that you're trying to steal revenue from who have the tools to make detection easy regardless of what your custom chip does.
Yeah, I think this is the real danger. "I don't know why this i9 isn't performing like expected" is a problem where the cause may be much harder to trace if people can reliably change what the processor reports itself as. And even then, the question only even gets asked by those who actually benchmark it.
With GPUs you can do things like dump its BIOS, alter the identification string, and then re-flash the card.
I've modified a lot of GPU BIOSes to tweak GPU and memory clock timings or enable Mac support.
CPUs aren't that easy to modify. I am not aware of any consumer tools that can simply re-write CPU's internal code.
Regardless, the first time you run a benchmark and it shows that your CPU is really X and not Y, you will know something is wrong.
And on windows just open task manager...
But it seems the person buying doesn't really understand all that, or doesn't seem to have the use of it?
Throw in the buyer never mentions if the product came from amazon or a third party as written in the article. Amazon should be verifying the quality of the 3rd party sellers, it is shit not to, but come on. To not know? It says Sold By: in the main section if the sale. If it says sold by Elite 100 and not amazon... it is sold by Elite 100.
This reminds me of the black market IC thing that caused so much chaos about 15 years ago.
No one considered that the guy maybe delidded and swapped it himself? Or a tampered return going unnoticed?