- Buyers face RAM scams due to price of high-end kits
- There have been reported cases where DDR5 RAM sticks have been replaced with inferior products.
- These scenarios may be scammers gaming the returns system, but regardless, there is a crucial step you can take to protect yourself.
As the price of RAM rises so quickly it’s dizzying, in an unsurprising turn of events, scammers are trying to take advantage of the frankly ridiculous new premiums imposed on system memory.
Guru of 3D reported on an incident where someone purchased Corsair Vengeance DDR5 RAM sticks from Amazon, only to discover that the memory that arrived was DDR4 (which is a bit slower and cheaper).
And last week, VideoCardz reported a similar (but worse) scenario in which an Amazon RAM buyer in Spain discovered that an Adata XPG DDR5 kit actually contained (positively old) DDR or DDR2 system memory.
In the first case, it was a more sophisticated fraud case where the modules had been replaced with the old RAM, although in the second incident the scammer had simply put a fake sticker saying DDR5 RAM on the very old USB sticks.
It is not yet known what the result was in the second case, but in the first, where the DDR4 modules were inserted, Amazon made a replacement (because a refund was not very useful, given that the price of the product had increased again since purchase).
Note that these were products purchased directly from Amazon (and shipped by the retailer), not from a third-party seller. So how come they’re fake, then? What usually happens in these cases is that the scammer buys the genuine product on Amazon and files a return, inserting the fake RAM and keeping the real keys for themselves.
This should of course be picked up by Amazon, but in these cases the retailer may have missed or mischecked the return – that’s why it was resold to some unfortunate person, or that’s the best theory.
How to avoid falling victim to such a scam?
I would expect Amazon to clean up any mishaps like this, but you obviously want to avoid becoming a victim in the first place, if possible – and make sure you have solid proof of a scam to fall back on, if you’re having trouble making your case to the retailer (whether Amazon or any other outlet).
So, to ensure you aren’t a victim, don’t buy high-value tech products like RAM or graphics cards (which are also regular targets for these types of stings) from a third-party seller on Amazon (or elsewhere). When you’re spending a lot of money, the risk just isn’t worth it.
As we’ve seen, even if you buy a product sold and fulfilled by Amazon, things can still go wrong. That’s why it’s very important to do one thing with high-value items like DDR5 kits or GPUs: record your unboxing. This may seem like an exaggeration, but if you have video proof, it is obviously tangible proof of what happened during the purchase.
So when you take delivery of an item, take out your phone and film the package (including the labels on the top), then continue recording it as you open the box, take out the product, and remove your purchase from its own box. This way, if there is a stone or metal weight in the box (which happened with GPUs), or fake RAM sticks with a DDR5 sticker poorly stuck on them, you have an actual record of that coming out of the shipped box (showing the relevant labels with product and serial numbers on the hardware itself). This way, if you have any issues with claims or returns procedures, you have this video to support you.
Adata then released some tips on how to check if memory modules are genuinely made by the company, which is useful for checking anything you think is somewhat suspicious, but it won’t help you avoid a scam like this in the first place.
These scams certainly suggest that Amazon needs to step up its monitoring of returns to ensure that genuine products are not replaced with counterfeits by malicious buyers. Either that, or it’s possible that someone else will swap the real goods for a counterfeit at another point in the supply or retail chain, although that seems a less likely prospect.
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