Wow - this took some effort - especially the lead CPU :P How many of these went out world-wide? Will definitely be an interesting story to watch.

Even the French text is mangled beyond belief.

hahah why would someone wanna unbox a fake product...i dont get it but the products amazing cant wait to REALLY unbox one

Sounds like someone somewhere made a case, or pallet, or whatever of these and did a quick-switch to get a case of the real things.

The french is actually not mangled. Hmm interesting!!

really, if you're going to the effort of manufacturing and printing all these boxes and items, at least spell it right so on the OUTSIDE is looks legit.

how lazy can they be, bring more than 1 person in on the proofing...

What difference does it make how it was spelled? It was good enough to get past the employees of NewEgg, and that is all that mattered. once the first customer received one, the jig was up and the game was over. Mission accomplished. Damage done. Too bad this distributor will never be brought to justice.

William:

Wow, I can't believe I have to explain this..

We want it un-boxed because we want to know how it fooled so many people.

From the people that imported it, to the OEM company that signed, approved, paid for the fake ones and handed over a check for hundreds (if not thousands) of boxes full of trash.

You would think that somewhere, someone, would have actually opened a box to approve long before it got shipped to retail customers.

Anyway, the point of un-boxing wasn't "oh wow i am so excited to buy this and can't wait to see what's inside!!"

Sounds like this might be the same processor used in a P-P-P-Powerbook!

http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/

Is this made in China? well, I may think twice before buying anything from newegg.com again. They don't do any QA at all from their side. I guess newegg.com is another Toyota story. Did they grow too quick beyond their control?

I wonder if any Customs agents looked at them. Well, they're violating trademarks but they're not really fake processors... more like artist's impressions of a processor.

Wowsers. I saw stuff like this being hawked out of car trunks in the ghettos of Los Angeles. (People were buying, too.) This usually stings the people who can least afford it.

$10 says the French disclaimer was just the English disclaimer run through Babelfish.

I also heard the 'security tape' on the box was fake as well. The anti-tamper text wasn't part of the tape, but printed ON the box!

The reason why it was probably easy to get through was they may have switched out the center portion of a pallet with these fake ones leaving a few rows of real ones around them. The person receiving them see's that they are real and all the boxes look the same so why check every single one. I bet now they will be inspecting them one by one.

What's with the NewEgg hate? It's not like they knowingly sent out fakes. From what I read, it was distributed from another factory. I have never had a problem with NewEgg- they ship quickly and their customer service is top notch. Comparing them Toyota? Puh-lease. I missed the part where they or Intel tried to cover up exploding chips that killed people and sent them to the unsuspecting public regardless!

@Doug: This isn't quite the same thing as the Toyota issue. For this to match you would either still drive toyota but ban your dealership or you would stop buying intel.

Neweggs Q&A department did nothing wrong, you cannot open a chip box for inspection without losing the chip or at least retail value vs openbox value of the chip.
The point of this whole article was to show "look everything appeared legit until you opened the box".

@Jeff S : The french disclaimer looks mostly legit, but it may be only because we are used to badly translated texts on tech products...

3 errors though : "solution" shouldn't be plural, the second c in "conçue" misses a cedilla, and they used the wrong accent on "limitée".

depending on when these were created, they may even have needed an inside man at intel or the printing house that makes the packaging in order to create such a close copy. My guess is due to the mis-spellings they are working of images instead of .eps files. Otherwise you would have had an exact replica of the box. This means that some other packaging manufacturer somewhere knew this was going on, or said facility had an inside man that could do this run of packaging undetected. Syndicate level crime?

Nothing against the Chinese people as a whole but against these particular Chinese that did this....DAMN! They will even sell their own people fake baby formula that eventually kills the babies that it is fed to in order to make a buck! Then their government makes a raid to bust that ring of counterfiters up for show to the international community. They sieze the fake formula and then.....wait for it......wait for it....PUT IT BACK ON THE MARKET THEMSELVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! These people don't care about anything else except themselves. If they can do this with baby forumla then a bunch of i7 procs is no sweat.

For those hating on NewEgg, this is not their fault. Check out their rating on ResellerRatings.com and you will see how good they are. They were duped, plain and simple, and they can hardly be blamed for it. You try running a company that does hundreds of thousands of orders a month and checking each and every pallet so thoroughly as to make sure that a box that upon cursory inspection looks legit isn't filled with garbage. They trust their suppliers not to ship them this junk, and when stuff like this gets discovered, proper action is taken. I guarantee you that NewEgg sent out real processors to everyone who initially received a fake one and they did it for free. Try buying something from NewEgg (as I have, multiple times) and see for yourself how well-run this company actually is before you trash them out.

So, when will you publish some fake benchmarks for it? :o)

Doug is obviously a competitor or simply clueless.

Newegg isn't a QA shop. Comparing them to Toyota is like comparing a restaurant to a farm. They sell things.. usually quite cheaply.. and you get it very quick. Everything I've heard says that Newegg was proactive on this from the start, contacting customers on their own to tell them of the problem, and offering to correct it immediately.

LOL@Markus !!

Ever seen "High Density" memory for sale on eBay? It is absolute garbage but makes the seller US$ in a land where the average worker makes US$5-10 per day.

The diverted i7 chips will go to a chinese computer manufacturer who will pay US$500-750 for each. There are probably 1,000-2,000 of these now in circulation. Probably cost 5 per box to to fake including bribes, net profit ... US$450,000 - US$1.2Million. So why are you surprised? And the likelyhood of discover and conviction is absolutely zero in China.

So why are we surprised? The miracle to me is that we don't get more junk like this out of China, Taiwan, Malaysia.

Im wonder if you can find the real chips on ebay. This is a pretty funny heist.
As a company Newegg does it right for their customers. Great customer service, I don't see this as their fault at all.

NewEgg is very shadey. One of my friends worked for a power supply manufacturer and NewEgg would knowingly purchase mislabeled 300W power supplies and resell them at 450W. Remember if the deal is too good to be true it usually is.

@Markus I imagine they'll show up very early next month. ;)

No hating on them, but would it be fair to say they got NewEgg on their faces?

as long as the overclocking stays under 621F (327C) degrees the lead wont melt ;-)

By the way, the company is in the city of "Fremont, Ca" not FREEMONT...

Svenbot, you just slinging muck! NewEgg has been a upright retailer for more years than you've probably been around. The best thing for idiots like you to do is keep quite, that way people will mistake you for someone intelligent.

This sort of stuff happens more often than you realize. My company purchased a couple dozen computers from Lenovo a few years ago. The computer boxes we received looked genuine from the outside. When we opened them up, they were filled with bags of rice that were carefully measured and packed to make someone think a real computer was inside.

Send them to Apple they would never know

Svenbot is a lying troll. No substantiation, no link, no proof, no credibility.

I have been doing business with NewEgg for years. I have a huge pile of purchase orders from them. Not ONCE have they ever misled me as to what they were going to ship. Not ONCE have they shipped me anything but what was promised. They handle returns gladly and treat their customers right.

They may not have the most user-friendly policies but they DO tell you RIGHT UP FRONT what their policies are, and they STICK to them.

Really the best thing about newegg is the user reviews. I have saved myself a lot of frustration and wasted time by reading the reviews. I have submitted poor reviews of their products, and they have not hesitated to put them up.

The manufacturing process involves individual measurement of each box. I suppose the LED was used to get the weight close to that of the original one.

I'm shocked you spelled Fremont wrong...

Thanks JP! I had totally forgotten about the P-P-P-Powerbook! Ahh, good times :)

Guy Tanzer: *slap* No, no it is not.

Who cares!! As long as NewEgg stands behind their offering, I don't really need to know what a piece of lead looks like or whether the hunk of plastic is capable of cooling the nonworking cpu!

Now if you could tell me who actually pocketed the money on the distant end of the transaction, then this would be a compelling story.

This is what ACTA should be about, instead of pretending it is when it is not about counterfeiting, it's about copyright infringement.

I've been using NewEgg for almost 10 years now and I don't have a single complaint about them. They're my preferred online company - anything I need that they stock, I buy from them. Why? Because they treat their customers right, they ship products quickly, they have a great return policy, and they never, ever give me any crap when I need to RMA a defective memory stick or a failing hard drive.

Just the fact that we have so many people defending a corporate entity (NewEgg, in this case) in the comments of this article speaks volumes about that company's integrity and customer loyalty. People like NewEgg, and they feel obliged to defend it. You don't often see that kind of loyalty towards online retailers.

I've dealt with a lot of shoddy, shady companies online over the last decade. NewEgg is by far the most respectable online retailer I have ever used.

I would bet that few, if any, customers receiving one of these fake chips is going to walk away from the ordeal unhappy with the service and support they receive from NewEgg.

How many megahertz are they?

Prolly faster than AMD

Interesting article. When I first saw the word "counterfeit" as mentioned by Newegg I thought there were actual working parts: either test rejects that found their way out of the factory, or even working chips from a non-intel fab (is that possible?). This article shows that they were just props.

Writing [CORRECTED] next to the name of my hometown when it's still spelled wrong doesn't make it correct, guys. :D

That said, very interesting, thanks for the pics.

I want one of these!

The only megahertz you're going to get from that is if you throw it at someone.

You have not posted any performance tests. I am guessing being made of lead this processor has far more performance than the original Intel part. Da?

Crazy heist. I can somehow imagine an Ocean 11-esque type of move to swap out the fake boxes for the real ones. Good job on NewEgg side to determine culprit and fix the problem. Made a few purchase with NewEgg and only gripe is that once or twice they've packaged my mailing slip with the CC information showing on the box. Aside from the NewEgg is topnotch.

The mangled translation and the idea of scamming people sending obviously counterfeit goods with a pretty package stinks of made in China. But to the next level. I know it because I live there.

On the bright side, now we know Newegg sells grey market products without disclosing it and can shop accordingly.

I can not think of a more solid e-retailer than Newegg. Note the shady box label says Made in Costa Rica, so a respectable county gets slammed with a respectable e-retailer.

Well I'll Tell You Newegg Has Possibly The Worst Dead Pixel Policy On Monitors They Sell!,Eight Dead Is Acceptable By Them!I Won't Buy One There.

Despite all the headaches people have been having... if made by a friend this sure would be a hell of a prank. Hahaha.

@Doug

How does it feel to be a tool to media and to have no common sense?

Wow, that must have gone over like a lead i7.

In Newegg's defense, I did get one of those lead-core i7s, and they upgraded me to a brass one for no extra charge. Who else would even offer to do that? I'd definitely shop there again!

The crooks that pulled this off must be writing code for Toyota on the side.

NewEgg apparently bought "sideways" and were burned.

"Sideways buying" is when product is obtained from somewhere other than the upstream distributors.

All the large retailers, and even the wholesale distributors, do some sideways buying when there is money to be made. Who wouldn't? Only rarely (like this) has it actually caused much of a problem.

Who would go through all the trouble of creating fake plastic fans, cpu's made of lead, the box, the materials...

@SilentBoy741

Eh? I think most vendors that delivers a product you obviously didn't order will fix it for no extra charge. Else it would be a very bad vendor indeed. I wouldn't dream of ever paying extra for getting the right stuff delivered.

If you have ordered the wrong things, then you pay of course.

oh no, what happened to Intel? at least AMD does not have any of its CPU counterfeited...

crasybaby =heads up newegg no. 1. good scam ouch!

Honestly, why would anyone even bother to produce something like this?
If it isn't even usable, it stands to reason that it will be busted the moment anyone opens the packaging, and any hope of selling more than a few batches is virtually zero.

You'd think it would cost more to put these into mass production than they would ever be able to make selling them - not to mention they'll probably be sued for it.

OK, where is the benchmark of this new kind of CPU?

The cooler works just fine. After installing and flipping the power switch,several hours later the whole thing was still room temperature.

What I find amazing is that they go to the trouble of making and packaging the fake CPU, with a fan like that (which is obviously easier to make...)...

For all those blasting the country of origin, where in all the "legitimate" articles on this issue is the country of origin mentioned?

For all anyone knows, the fake could of been made in California there in the good old U.S. of A.

Interesting posts , prolly most people don use a spell cheeker.. they probably should before sending or improve some grammar skills before posting on sites where people are expected to Read and understand what they are reading. Nuff said on that. Chips, people are greedy and don't care if they screw people out of a few houndred dollars or thousands from the Corporations. Too bad there are many more like these out there doing the same thing with other products. I have been fortunate not to have been scammed and my sympathy is with those who were unsuspecting victims in this Tech Circus... Overclocking would seem out of the question I guess....

First, those who created these scam processors were undoubtedly not anywhere in the official shipping chain. Too easy to trace back. The "manufacturer" of these fakes probably has accomplices in the shipping chain somewhere, who would have slipped these babies in unnoticed in pallets that are rarely examined closely. Newegg apparently was drop-shipping them, they never even saw them. Figuring the net profit on the black market sales of the real stolen processors could be thousands, this was a well-planned and executed robbery, and Newegg - and others in the chain - are victims. I'm betting the fake employees are long gone.

Someone guessed rightly. I7-920's aren't just handled without static protection to avoid Zapping them. That's why it was possible to pull this stunt/con. Any QA involved didn't want that responsibility and liability on their shoulders.

Well, it does look pretty cool for a fake product, I'll give it that much.

get a better camera and take some better pictures i can barely make out the intricate details its hard to tell what i'm looking at without the caption

There's one on eBay with a pretty funny FAQ:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Famous-Newegg-Genuine-Fake-Intel-Core-i7-Demo-Processor_W0QQitemZ330411508071QQcmdZViewItemQQptZCPUs?hash=item4cee0f8167

all the language errors' juz look too familiar, and with >90% of things "made in china" today, anyone wanna second guess the 'origins' of these fakes?

Brings a new meaning to "LEADing Edge Technology"

Fremont is Spelled with One E not Two E's.
Fremont as in John C Fremont
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Fr%C3%A9mont

Monoprice (cheap cables etc.) has shut down for two weeks because of internal credit card fraud.

These sound more like they were intended for use as phony display samples rather than to be sold as computer chips.

I bet these fake processors will sell later on for a lot of money, just because people want to be a part of the hoax.

So, the performance is about the same as the last intel release?

Wow, a $500 fishing weight. Nice.

Well, At least it won't overheat, so they were right not to supply a fan. Beats me how they could make such a great hologram, but not run a spell checker. Why aren't the suppliers being prosecuted?

Actually, Toyota is worse than Newegg! I would still buy from Newegg, not from Toyota!! Those F**cking bastar*s do not stand behind their product. Buyer Beware!! F*ck Toyota - Scion - Lexus all three companies which are formally 1 company lick my sweaty nut sack.

Newegg should scrutinize new suppliers.

Looks like they simply accept anyone without checking references.

booohoo poor newegg... lol