There’s yet another new application for 3D printing, but this one has to be filed in the “do not do this” category.
The case involves the purchase of an AMD Ryzen CPU chip, presumably for installation in a home PC. The buyer, Reddit contributor Bigmancal420, apparently purchased it at a local Amazon returns warehouse at a steep discount.
At first glance, the “CPU” appears to be legitimate, but once opened it was revealed to be a 3D printed replica — a hunk of plastic that would not be processing anything.
Evidently the original buyer of the Ryzen CPU took out the actual chip and replaced it with the plastic replica. Then it was returned to Amazon as defective.
Amazon has a weird approach for most returns: they don’t want to incur shipping costs back to the manufacturer, so they typically dump them locally to anyone willing to buy them. The terms are stark: no returns, item is as-is. It’s an easy way for Amazon to recover at least some cash from a failed sale.
But in this case, the sale succeeded, and the return was the fraud.
Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done for the buyer because of the terms of the returns sale. They are stuck with a rather nice CPU replica.
This type of fraud has been seen before many times at Amazon, who have been disposing of leftover items in this way for many years. Typically, however, the fraudster would just box up a rock, sand, or other worthless junk to pretend there was something worthwhile inside the box.
Here, the fraudster took the time to design, print, and return a replica of the original item. If there was any returns verification done by Amazon, the replica would probably pass a quick visual inspection by Amazon staff — if they do this at all.
The value in printing the replica seems to be “insurance” against being detected as a fraudulent return.
And thus we have a new 3D print application.
Do not do this.
Via Reddit
