The RAMpocalypse has developed a whole new style of scam: one unlucky gamer opened a sealed box of new DDR5 memory from Amazon only to find two sticks of DDR2

Seems like everywhere you look there’s a fresh scam on the hardware marketplace, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for even the most vigilant PC Gamer to avoid. Case in point, one unlucky shopper thought they were getting DDR5 RAM at a decent price, only to have sticks of DDR2 memory with shoddy printed labels mimicking DDR5 heatsinks turn up at their door.

The shopper in question goes by the handle BravoNorris, and had scooped up the last four available XPG Caster 32 GB DDR5-6000 CL40 kits from Adata, each containing two sticks of 16 GB memory. All were sold as new and sealed from Amazon Spain. After selling one, and installing another, BravoNorris opened a third box only to find the sticker scam in their hand. That’s when they reached out to VideoCardz with the story.

This third box was plastic-wrapped like the other three, and had shipped from the same point of origin in Ireland. However, this box contained two old sticks of DDR2 memory with DDR5 heatsink stickers that could fool someone only checking the product through the packaging window.

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BravoNorris also found a small plate of metal inside the box, likely placed to account for the weight discrepancy. As such, what’s most likely to have happened is that someone else has previously bought what was originally a memory genuine kit, replaced the contents, resealed it, and then returned it to Amazon. In other words, return fraud.

As the memory apocalypse rages on, it’s perhaps unsurprising to opportunistic scams like these. At the start of the year we waded through a sea of ridiculous graphics card pricing, with plenty of ne’er do wells making the most of the desperate market. Beyond scalpers online attempting to flip RTX 5090 graphics cards they don’t actually have for $7,000, even brick-and-mortar retail wasn’t safe.

(Image credit: Future)

For instance, $90,000 worth of RTX 5090 GPUs had been replaced in-box with crossbody backpacks at just one unfortunate Silicon Valley Micro Center store. It’s not all doom and gloom though, as plenty of eBay users then got their own back at scalping bots by listing printed pictures of the RTX 5090 for $2000—sometimes throwing in a snazzy frame from Target too.

It remains to be seen whether Amazon will refund this unfortunate link in the scam chain. For anyone concerned about falling afoul of return fraud themselves, VideoCardz advises recording your own unboxings—from stripping back the shrinkwrap to inspecting the serial numbers—for every expensive hardware purchase just in case and I concur.

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