Amazon.com, a company that recently boasted of yearly sales revenues as high as $638 billion and operating incomes as high as $68.9 billion, has been shipping fake AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processors to unsuspecting customers, according to a new report written by a hardware enthusiast who claims to have received a “made in China” version of the CPU, one that came with not only a square-shaped IHS, but also a completely different pin configuration than what AM5 users are accustomed to.
“All seemed legit till I opened the box, with the weird looking processor, having nothing to do with the 9000 series. I immediately noticed the different heatspreader, the pins (!) on the bottom side, and the writing on the heatspreader which tells from miles away that it is ‘fake’!,” Hardware Busters’ crmaris wrote in an article that he published on March 9 before going on to show some comparison shots of what his fake Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU looks like next to a legitimate chip from AMD:
“The processor I got [was from] Amazon.de,” crmaris goes on to clarify before posting another photo that shows how the fake Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU that he received had a sticker on top, one that hid its true identity: an AMD FX CPU.
Here’s the full word from crmaris, including a look at the box that Amazon had allegedly sent to him:
“This is a common scam based on the abuse of amazon’s return policy,” one viewer opined. “Fraud buys a new 9800x3d > replaces it with a fake one > sends it back to amazon > they don’t check box and cpu properly because they are incompetent > the fake processor goes to the next victim customer. They could easily find the scammer, but no one seems to do anything about it.”