Ryzen RMA Fraud Going On At Amazon

I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this. It seems Amazon’s inventory of Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 processors seem to be suffering from RMA fraud. It has been reported that this fraud consists of an unknown party buying up Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 series processors and them RMAing them back to Amazon with a fake CPU inside. The fake CPU appears to be some type of older Intel-based LGA model.

fake ryzen

The RMA gets past screening because the heatspreader on the CPU has been relabeled with an authentic looking AMD Ryzen label, which apparently is enough to fool a very PC-knowledge limited Amazon RMA employee. From there the product will get sold again as an open-box item, which is normally what happens with RMA’s.

Since these are LGA processors and Ryzen motherboard of course need a processor with pins the odds of you damaging your motherboards are very low, even if you are a first time builder. You are going to immediately notice something is wrong. I would be pretty pissed if I was waiting for my new Ryzen processor and one of these showed up!

Amazon does appear to be handling the situation well, refunding affected buyers and even issuing gift cards for their trouble.

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