Pretty sure that most tech people who are hunting for a good deal have run into 1 or 2 bad ones where they don’t get what they are told – the good ol’ “Listing A but selling B” trick. However, the scummiest ones are those who sold nothing, hereby scamming the hard-earned money of innocent buyers.
Such tactics resurfaced recently when famous tech YouTuber and delid expert Der8auer received a fan submission where he got scammed into buying a used AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU.
Purchased through one Romanian outlet known as OLX hosting mostly private sellers with zero backing and guarantees when it comes to warranties and such, it is reported that the fan only known as Bruce, wants to save a quick €100 on the usually ~€400-priced processor and thus went ahead with the order.
Alas, when he got the processor all sense of happiness died after plugging the CPU into his rig with no response and booting whatsoever.
Acknowledging the sad news, Der8auer paid Bruce the full RRP of the chip and went ahead with a thorough dissection. But before that even started, he went through the advertised pictures of the listing and a lot of things were suspicious – Wrong chip substrate color, off-pattern capacitors with a lack of resin, etc.
The “accusations” were confirmed upon receiving the die-less chip where the color difference and lack of resin are just facts at this point. Comparing it with a real 7800X3D, Der8auer felt the fake CPU has a thinner PCB (0.964mm fake vs 1.308mm real) and is harder to fit into a motherboard.
Upon delidding the fake chip, the IHS came off way easier than usual and there’s the void of emptiness with no silicon brain in sight. Apparently, the one behind the counterfeiting job was quite “professional” because they even “faked” the rectangular bump on the IHS’s underside to “mimic” the presence of CCDs and the I/O die.
Although “praises” was given to how much effort was poured into the process with the result hoodwinked potentially even more buyers out there, Der8auer also highlighted the importance of getting PC parts and products only from reputable platforms and sellers where a basic level of warranty or return guarantee shields customers from such scams.
Early this year, one victim submitted a PSA to Hong Kong-based tech media HKEPC where his 2nd-hand NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 had its die completely desoldered, leaving the card with everything else intact to obfuscate it as a “working GPU”.
Sources: Tom’s Hardware, Der8auer YouTube, Videocardz
