Buyer Receives Fake Core i9-13900K With i7-13700K Guts From Amazon

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 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.
- 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.
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.
- Same. I just go straight to AliExpress now and know what I'm going to get.

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.

It used to be the safe alternative to eBay... Nowadays maybe it's the opposite
- 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.
- 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 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.
- Wow. I thought you were heading towards it being self-published with fake accreditation or something. Did not expect this.
- Did they have the same ISBN?
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
For books try https://m.alibris.com/
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.
not suprising, amazon is just aliexpress but with 1-2 day shipping.

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
- 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.
- 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.

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!

This reminds me of the black market IC thing that caused so much chaos about 15 years ago.

Amazon always shit the bed, been waiting for my books for school for a week now.

No one considered that the guy maybe delidded and swapped it himself? Or a tampered return going unnoticed?