Amazon customer receives fake Ryzen 7 9800X3D, turns out to be decade-old AMD CPU

This has been an issue with Amazon for years.

They get stock from any third party sellers, stick it all together in the same place in the warehouse, then ship them out regardless of where they got them and which seller you bought from.

Honestly, they probably didn't even need to spend money on the sticker or old CPU. They could have shipped boxes of sand for all the checking Amazon do. There's absolutely no incentive for them to do so. They'll never be held to account for all the fake shit they sell.

The incentive is that Amazon can charge more for premium sellers to have private bins that safeguard against fraud

I was shopping for this same CPU last week and found an Amazon third-party store named something like "Big Tech Deals WE RECORD SERIAL NUMBERS".

If you have to name your store that, it's obviously an unsolved problem in the marketplace.

It was sold by Amazon itself rather than a third-party seller, which is often the case with these sorts of fake items.

The fact that the packaging was sealed and the CPU was unused suggests that this was not one of those instances in which someone bought an item and replaced it with a fake before sending it back for a refund.

co-mingled inventory strikes again.

I just dont trust amazon for tech tbh. January I ordered a new 1tb NVME and it arrived opened; I'm not about to trust an opened drive when i paid full price for a new one.

Its 100% a huge issue with Amazon, at this point pretty sure everyone knows how all the different sellers get lumped in together so you order from seller A and recieve a product from seller B because Amazon considers them the same thing. Means you can't even be sure wether the seller you thought you purchased from is the one that scammed you; and means even buying from a companies official amazon listing isn't protection.
- at this point everyone knows
  
  Yea I reckon most people don't know. Terminally online people know. In your average household, Amazon is prolly considered trustworthy.
Refund that defect.
- Oh i did, instantly. I was pissed at the time but i didnt even have the case for that build for another like, 4 days after that
That's why I buy local when I can. BestBuy sucks for a load of reasons, but they price match and can process replacements same day, so I feel a lotore confident buying there than ordering from Amazon. Likewise w/ Target and other brick and mortar stores.
- I am so lucky to live near a Microcenter.
Oh come on, you could be lucky like a friend of mine who found lots and lots of Rocco Siffredi videos on a new hdd. (it was store bought though, to be honest)
- Had to look up who that is, definitely don't think a drive full of mystery porn is "lucky"

That’s tech blogger was probably thinking “what the fuck, I need to return this piece of shit… wait. This would be a great video.”

I'm sure they were buying it for a video anyway.
- Yeah, the recipient mentioned this was for a review video. Now he’s getting a review video + this.

It happened to me a few years ago, when I ordered for work an i9 9900k, and inside the sealed box was a core 2 duo... After the seller (not Amazon) refused the return, I looked up a bit online, and it's a common practice. I even found rolls of "Intel original" seals for 5€ on eBay.

In those cases I just do a charge back on my credit card.
- I immediately ordered a new one from another vendor, as I really needed to build a workstation, and let the purchasing department handle the case. All I know was that the seller did not believe/accept the "wrong cpu story". From their perspective, it was a sealed box...

What even is the purpose of pulling this scam on a site like amazon. 99% of the time the customer is going to return the item since it definitely won't fit in the socket.

They lose nothing if you do return it and for the odd person who doesn't return it they stand to earn hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

The problem is the marketplaces shut the accounts down only for them to pop back up again to following day. The businesses need to be more proactive about this but they're not massively incentivized to do so because it isn't hurting their bottom line.

No one is doing anything about this because the only people who lose out are the customers and who cares about them?
Amazon bundle stuff from multiple sellers in the same location. They have no idea which of their third party sellers did it, and indeed could even be that a customer returned it for a full refund.
They may be trying to scam amazon itself

I've had them instantly send me a new 2tb nvme when the one arrived with no drive in the box. The chatbot didn't even blink.