Black Friday PC shoppers beware, as a few fake listings are hitting Amazon. The mega online retailer has found itself with bad actors trying to take advantage of the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D selling out by listing some fake chips well under the MSRP.
The quick lesson here? If it’s too good to be true, it most likely is. The 9800X3D has quickly become one of the best gaming CPU upgrades for your PC. It offers excellent performance for its price and has quickly been swept off the shelves by avid PC gaming enthusiasts.
Originally spotted by outlet GameGPU on November 21, Amazon shoppers are potentially being taken ripped off by these dastardly deals. One of the listings being highlighted is riddled with mistakes, including saying the CPU is for the Amiga 500, which came out in 1987.
Seller Huangwenjie12334 has also not listed it under the AMD brand, but a “HHNDVZ” label. Clicking through this also shows Meta Quest 3 Batman bundles being sold at $139.99, which are very clearly fake.
How does this happen? Well, Amazon doesn’t actually stock and sell everything on the site. Millions of sellers around the world use Amazon as their storefront to reach a wider audience. That means Amazon can’t always be on top of ensuring every listing from every supplier is genuine.
Potentially more troubling for buyers is that Amazon will sometimes have top listings for searches skip a sold out product and show instead a source where there product is available. Thankfully, the listing’s incorrect setup means that this scenario couldn’t come to pass here. If the seller had correctly mimicked the original AMD listing, it could have very easily slipped into place automatically. Instead, it’s been siloed away.
An X user showed a screenshot of the scam listings in the early hours of November 22. Multiple listings are shown for the search term “9800X3D”. We also checked on Amazon.com ourselves and, sure enough, the top search for this shortened version of the product name – i.e. not including AMD – comes up with a fake listing still. Suffice to say, we’ve reported the seller.
If you want to stay safe in the wide vastness of Amazon, we recommend sticking to our best Black Friday PC gaming deals. It’ll be continuously updated throughout the event with legitimate deals, so you can rest easy knowing that your next component isn’t potentially going to be a brick in a box.