- A Redditor reportedly bought a 96GB DDR5 RAM kit from Corsair
- One stick was defective, we’re told, so the set had to be returned
- The replacement turned out to be $35 worth of dummy RGB light modules, and Corsair is now investigating what happened here
We’ve seen a number of expensive RAM purchases go awry recently, and here’s another tale of memory woes.
While we’ve previously reported on RAM scams that happened via resellers like VideoCardz reports, in this case the buyer dealt directly with the manufacturer, or so the post on Reddit tells us.
The Redditor says they bought a 96GB RAM kit from Corsair – we don’t know the exact model, but these DDR5 products now start at $999 in the US, after the ridiculous price hike of memory over the past few months – and had to return it when a stick of RAM didn’t work.
It was sent back to Corsair for a replacement, but when the new DDR5 RAM arrived, it wasn’t DDR5 RAM at all. In fact, as pointed out by others on Reddit, what the poster for the thread received was a Corsair lighting upgrade kit. If you have empty RAM slots, these dummy modules are designed to slot into them, simply to give the illusion of full banks of premium memory (and amplify the RGB lighting effects inside your PC).
Of course, these RGB modules are not good for anything by themselves, as they are empty and don’t actually contain any memory chips.
They’re also a tad cheaper at $35 compared to the big bucks the Redditor shelled out for their 96GB memory kit.
While the RAM and other hardware scams (often GPUs) we’ve seen at Amazon aren’t entirely unusual, it’s more unusual to see this happen when you’re buying directly from the manufacturer. In fact, you wouldn’t expect this at all.
It is of course possible that there has been an error in Corsair’s internal system and a shipping error. Or that a bad actor in the same spirit as many (alleged) Amazon scams could have bought the DDR5 RAM and the empty light modules, then initiated a return of the memory and shipped the latter instead – and Corsair didn’t catch the scam. Of course, all of this is just speculation.
Anyway, the good news is that a Corsair representative has contacted Reddit and has a ticket number from the buyer, so is now investigating this incident with the company’s support team – and the Redditor should be contacted ASAP. Hopefully a solution is at hand.
The Corsair rep also just responded to another thread on Reddit and yet another reported Amazon scam where someone ordered Corsair DDR5 RAM and got old DDR4 memory instead. In this case, it was the memory sticks that worked, and a less tech-savvy buyer might not have noticed any difference.
We can no doubt expect to see more of this kind of plug going forward, especially if RAM becomes even more expensive (which is a possibility, believe it or not, in the near term).
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