The RAM crisis is bringing out DDR5 counterfeiters

Caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”) is the rallying cry of every con man and huckster who tries to fleece a mark. But it’s worth keeping in mind if you’re hunting for a deal in the nightmarish hellscape that is the PC market in 2026, especially if you’re doing so on secondary markets like Craigslist and eBay. Thanks to the RAM crisis, scams are multiplying quickly, as they always do for in-demand goods.

According to several posters from Japan, fake DDR5 SO-DIMM (laptop) modules are now popping up in online listings. These are nominally interesting if only for their methods. They’re allegedly using fake plastic memory chips glued onto DDR5 circuit boards, either wholly or partially replacing the memory and presumably being passed on to more lucrative customers. Digital Trends reports that online Yahoo listings marked these RAM modules as “junk” or “untested” hardware, pleading ignorance in order to give a “no returns” cop-out for the sellers.

Most end users wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between real and fake memory, at least not until they installed it into their system and got either a failed boot or far less RAM than they paid for. One Twitter user (machine translated) said that they had to cut open the “RAM” chips in order to finally figure out they’d been swindled. Fake stickers to cover the chips are allegedly being circulated on the gray market.

It’s pretty obvious advice to tell you to avoid scams, but it’s still worth keeping in mind. The pattern is predictable—see also GPUs that turned out to be bricks, processors re-lidded, etc. I get the feeling that this “it’s broken, take your chances” approach might make the rounds as people get desperate for affordable laptops.

Say you’re looking for RAM and someone’s selling a gaming or enterprise laptop with a “broken screen” but 64GB of accessible SO-DIMM RAM. Anyone who knows what they’re doing would strip those out and sell them separately. But someone with malice of forethought might sell the whole laptop with an inflated price, safe in the knowledge that since the whole thing is “broken,” swapping in some mislabelled RAM or storage could get an unwary deal-hunter to shell out a few hundred bucks for something truly worthless.

Keep a sharp eye out there. If you’re dropping serious cash on a secondary market purchase, make sure you have a means of reversing the charge if you get burned.