- Buyers run into RAM scams because of the price of high-end kits
- There have been reports of DDR5 RAM sticks being replaced with inferior products
- These scenarios could be scammers gaming the return system, but whatever the case, there is one crucial step you can take to protect yourself
With the price of RAM rising so fast it’s staggering, scammers are, in an unsurprising twist, trying to take advantage of the new and frankly ridiculous premiums that system memory commands.
Guru of 3D reported an incident where someone allegedly bought Corsair Vengeance DDR5 RAM sticks from Amazon, only to find that the memory that arrived was DDR4 (which is quite a bit slower and cheaper).
And last week, VideoCardz reported a similar (but worse) scenario, where a buyer of RAM from Amazon in Spain found an Adata XPG DDR5 kit that actually contained DDR or DDR2 (positively ancient) system memory.
In the former case, it was a more sophisticated case of fraud where the modules had been replaced with the older RAM, although in the latter case the fraudster had simply slapped a fake sticker saying DDR5 RAM on the very old memory sticks.
It is not yet clear what the outcome was in the second case, but in the first, where the DDR4 modules were replaced, Amazon made a replacement (since a refund was not very good, since the price of the product had increased again since the purchase).
Note that these were products purchased directly from Amazon (and shipped by the retailer), not a third-party seller. So why are they so fake? What generally happens in these cases is that the scammer buys the genuine product from Amazon and sends a return, swaps in the fake RAM and keeps the real sticks for themselves.
This should of course be picked up by Amazon, but in these cases the retailer may have somehow overlooked or failed to check the return properly – therefore it was resold to some unlucky soul, or that’s the best guess theory.
How can you avoid being scammed like this?
I’d expect Amazon to make good on any incidents like these, but of course you’ll want to avoid becoming a victim in the first place if possible – and make sure you have hard evidence of a scam to rely on if you run into problems approaching the retailer (whether it’s Amazon or another retail outlet).
So, to make sure you’re not a victim, don’t buy high-value tech products like RAM or graphics cards (which are also common targets for this kind of connector) from a third-party seller on Amazon (or elsewhere). When you’re spending a lot of money, it’s just not worth the risk.
However, as we’ve seen, things can still go wrong even if you buy a product sold and shipped by Amazon. That’s why it’s very important to do one thing with high-value items like DDR5 kits or GPUs – and that’s to record your unboxing of them. It may sound exaggerated, but if you have video evidence, it is of course hard proof of what happened to the purchase.
So when you receive an item, get your phone out and video the package (including the labels on top), then keep it on record as you open the box, take the product out, and remove your purchase from its own box. This way, if there’s a rock or metal weight in the box (which has happened with GPUs), or fake RAM sticks with a badly plastered DDR5 sticker on them, you’ll have an actual recording of this coming out of the shipped box (showing the appropriate product and serial number labels on the hardware itself). This way, should you run into any issues with complaints or returns procedures, you’ll have this video to back you up.
Adata has subsequently issued some advice on how to tell if memory modules are really made by the company, which is helpful in double-checking anything you feel is suspicious, but won’t help you avoid a scam like this in the first place.
These scams certainly suggest that Amazon needs to tighten up its returns policing to ensure genuine products aren’t being swapped out for fakes by unscrupulous buyers. Either that, or it’s possible that someone else replaces the real items with a fake at some other point in the supply or retail chain, although that seems less likely.
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