Several Fake AMD Ryzen Chips Spotted on Amazon and eBay; Consumers Warned

By Jessica Ferrera, Christian Post Contributor Friday, July 21, 2017

Crooks have found another way to scam unsuspecting PC consumers, and it is by selling fake AMD Ryzen chips on Amazon and eBay.

Recently, several Reddit users started thread conversations to share their experiences where the processor chips they bought online turned out to be fake. Based on the photos that the scam victims shared, the online-selling fraudsters gave a lot of effort in making and shipping them bogus AMD Ryzen products.

The Reddit threads initiated by two scam victims who received Intel chips disguised as Ryzen processors have already gained a lot of comments. Both fake products were shipped in seemingly untampered AMD Ryzen boxes.

Tom's Hardware suspects the chips sent to the victims could be Intel Celeron products. To carry out the scam, the report explained that fraudsters could have first purchased real Ryzen chips so they could scan the genuine label and print it on a sticker. This was later on attached to the fake processor to give it a misleading appearance.

Fraudulent schemes in online-based shopping are not new, and the typical advice in these kinds of situations is to avoid buying from a third-party reseller. Even legitimate online shopping sites like Amazon and eBay have been affected by these dealings, regardless of the safeguards and security measures the said sites try to implement.

However, this case is trickier as Reddit user sh00ter99 (one of the scam victims) attested the fake Ryzen chip he bought was actually tagged "sold and shipped by Amazon."

The Reddit user added: "My guess is that the thief just bought it, replaced the contents of the box and replicated an AMD looking seal for the box. So he just refunds it unopened, gets his money, gets to keep the CPU and just had to put something inside to make it look and weigh okay, so that the Amazon warehouse staff would not bother looking inside since the seal was okay."

Tom's Hardware also advised buyers to pay using credit cards and credible money wire services like PayPal since these payment options typically have post-sales service which lets dissatisfied customers place disputes for refunds.

There are hunches that the spread of the fake AMD Ryzen chips is a type of mass-scale fraud. However, the scope of the scam and the volume of bogus products out in the market are yet to be determined to confirm this speculation.