WTF?! There's been another incident further proving that buying from Amazon isn't always safe, even when the product is sold by the company itself. A customer who purchased a Corsair Vengeance DDR5 memory kit found that the included modules were actually DDR4 memory disguised to look like DDR5.
Redditor Leading-Growth-8361 posted in the r/pcmasterrace subreddit that he bought some Corsair Vengeance DDR5 for his PC, but got a nasty surprise instead.
According to the post, the buyer noticed that the heatsink casing on the RAM stick was very loose. The worst suspicions were confirmed when he tried to insert the RAM into his motherboard and found it did not fit.
As shown in the photos, the notch in the gold contacts isn't as close to the center as it should be in a DDR5 module. It's slightly further away from the middle of the stick, identifying it as DDR4. As such, it didn't fit into the RAM slot.
It appears that someone simply opened up the modules and stuck the outer casing from some DDR5 onto DDR4 RAM. Leading-Growth-8361 writes that he found an old Reddit post in which someone else was the victim of the same scam.
It's also noted that the scam RAM was sold and dispatched by Amazon rather than a third-party seller. But it's not the first time we've seen a fake Amazon product sold by the site itself.
The item came specifically from Amazon Warehouse, where you can buy discounted, open-box, returned, or slightly used items. The goods are supposedly inspected by Amazon, but cases like these where someone has kept the real product and returned a fake can easily slip through.
The good news is that the buyer did receive a full refund for the RAM.
With DDR5 prices reaching obscene levels, we're seeing an increasing number of scams involving these memory kits. It was only last week that someone bought what was supposed to be two XPG Caster 16GB DDR5-6000 CL40 RAM sticks from Amazon, only to find that the package they received contained DDR2 modules glued to metal weights.