Consumer Fraud or Not Fraud. You decide but watch out.

Generic items sold under brand name

Some internet retailers will advertise brand name items. But when they ship, you will get generic items. For example, a retailer may advertise Maxtor Hard Drive using Maxtor's actual hard drive model number. When you get that hard drive, you may find no Maxtor label anywhere on the hard drive. Not only that, you may not even find any manufacturer's name on it and not even the store label that sold you the item. When you contact the vendor they may say it is OEM. By the way, OEM is supposed to have manufacturers label and in most cases the manufacturers warranty as far as I know. On the other hand, private label refers to items manufactured for a specific vendor who can then put its own label on it and sell it. That is called private label and is not OEM. Maxtor will not stand behind the quality or warranty to the end use. Also you may be stuck with vendors own limited warranty and the vendor may go in and out of business and you get stuck without warranty. When you want to return the drive, you may be stuck with shipping and handling both ways and restocking fee. If you do not return is time, you cannot return it. Also you may have to do a lot of foot work to return it by getting an RMA. The above practice at the time of this writing is practiced by targetpcinc.com.

Features advertised do not exist

USB voice modem order. After use for sometime and wasting countless hours it was discovered that it has no voice support. The vendor was still advertising as voice modem even after reporting. Too late to return according to their policy. Watch out.

Camcorder and Digital Camera scam

When you place the order, it may come without rechargeable battery or other accessories. When you call, they may say it is an international or US model and accessories are charged separately. However, manufacturers website like Sony may tell a different story. If the price is too good to be true then watch out. At the time of this writing TCS Camera at tcscamera.com practices such policy.

They say product is in stock but is not

This is done by many vendors just to have you visit their site and end up selling something else while advertising ridiculously low price of the product they do not carry or will not sell to you at that price and will lie that it is not in stock.

Bad items sold

Watch out when you buy memory and CPU. Your system may crash more often and cause occasional data corruption that would make you want to blame Microsoft for writing buggy software. Grossly your memory etc would be working fine. There are ways that you can test the integrity of CPU and memory thoroughly that you can find elsewhere on internet.

Wrong manufacturer:

They may claim it is a Lucent Modem or Intel motherboard but all it may have is Lucent or Intel chipset. The motherboard of modem manufacturer would be anonymous hiding behind!!!