Scammers are getting very desperate or very clever. This time, the victim was a South Korean overclocker who got swindled with a fake Intel Core i9-14900K.
The overclocker, Safedisk, reportedly purchased a non-retail packaged 14900K from a Chinese “dealer”, which was practically “dead on arrival”. While it’s likely they purchased the chip out of morbid curiosity, the overclocker told HKEPC that there were signs of a scam. For starters, it arrived in a blister pack with a sticker that the warranty would be void if said pack was broken. Again, not off to a good start.
Upon opening the package, the exterior of the “fake” 14900K looked legitimate, except for the all-important weight that usually accompanies the silicon. It was then that Safedisk decided to pop the lid off the CPU and discover the absence of the crucial part of the component: the die.
Where a massive monolithic piece of silicon is supposed to sit, Safedisk was greeted with a vacant PCB. It stings, we know, and as Tom’s Hardware puts it: we don’t think this is the silicon lottery the overclocker was hoping for the 14900K to be a part of.
This isn’t the first time scammers have taken advantage of unknowing victims in the world of PCs. Last week, we reported on a gamer who purchased a hollowed-out NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, with the PCB lacking the critical GPU core and surrounding memory chips.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware)
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