Here’s the wildest fake CPU I’ve ever seen — and it was sold on Amazon

AMD’s new Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D are coming this week, but the 9800X3D from last year remains the hottest CPU in town if you’re building a gaming CPU. It’s so hot that YouTube channel Hardware Busters wanted to get a second one for testing. They bought one on Amazon… and got one of the most brazenly fake PC parts I’ve ever seen.

The short video is worth a watch (below) if you’re looking for a chuckle. But if you need a quick summary, the scammer printed a fake 9800X3D label sticker and slapped it onto another CPU. And not just another AM5 CPU, as we’ve seen with some scammers swapping CPU lids. Nope. Inside the sealed and legit-looking box was a 2011 AMD FX processor.

The FX processor is ancient by PC standards, missing the various notches of a more modern AMD design and still rocking hundreds of pointy contact pins on the bottom. It doesn’t even fit in an AM5 motherboard, and would probably destroy it if you were incautious enough to try.

Hardware Busters claimed they bought this directly from Amazon in Europe from a retail 9800X3D listing, not from a reseller or a used CPU. So what gives? A commenter on the write-up guesses that someone bought a legitimate 9800X3D from Amazon, swapped it for the old CPU with a sticker, and returned it, fooling some poor Amazon worker with the fake label. Another possibility is that someone intercepted the box earlier in the supply chain and made the switch.

That’s speculative, but it’s essentially the same setup as the lid-swapping scam we’ve seen elsewhere, with a lot less work. A scammer wouldn’t need to disassemble a pre-built PC for the weaker AM5 processor or swap lids. They’d just track down a practically free processor that fits in the 9800X3D box and print out the sticker. Fortunately for Hardware Busters, they spotted the fake right away and have their receipts.

I’m glad to have watched the videos, if only because it’ll make me a little more wary. I bought a bunch of parts (including a very similar 7950X3D processor!) for my brother-in-law last year, but scheduling issues kept us from actually assembling his new PC for months, far beyond Amazon’s return window. The parts were just sitting in their boxes in the interim… so now I’ll make sure to check everything as they come in.