Miscommunication and mistakes don't rise to the level of deliberate "lying" - they would say "Our inspection tech made a mistake and thought there was thermal paste on the socket. We're sorry." and that would have explained the entire RMA situation. Then some blah blah about making it easier for customers to escalate to a manager, while not really reforming their processes.
Instead, this situation is much worse - they sold a known-broken refurbished-at-best motherboard as "open box" (fraud #1), and then rejected the return for fictitious reasons (fraud #2), likely because the RMA inspection tech saw that the motherboard was an unsellable piece of trash and had every incentive to make the customer eat it.
And I don't see how the Gigabyte sticker being there indicates it was not the board originally sent to GN. It's completely plausible that meets the requirements for "open box" at Newegg. And IIRC nowhere on the sticker does it say that the CPU socket is broken, rather that specific history was obtained by calling Gigabyte and asking.
> And I don't see how the Gigabyte sticker being there indicates it was not the board originally sent to GN. It's completely plausible that meets the requirements for "open box" at Newegg. And IIRC nowhere on the sticker does it say that the CPU socket is broken, rather that specific history was obtained by calling Gigabyte and asking.
First of all, it’s just my personal theory; the sticker being there does not prove anything. But the sticker does say¹:
DAMAGED BY USER CANNOT REPAIR
[x] CPU SOCKET DAMAGED
This makes me guess that it’s unlikely that this was the same motherboard which the returns people at NewEgg sometimes claimed “Thermal paste on motherboard” on, and sometimes claimed that GN caused the CPU socket damage.
Ah, you're right about the sticker. I didn't zoom in on it when I first watched the video, so maybe his explanation skipped that or I misunderstood.
I think it's likely the RMA tech just ignored the sticker because they're used to seeing such stickers, if "open box" really is a free for all. The RMA tech's job isn't to look for reasons that something is Newegg's fault, but rather to look for reasons that it is the customer's fault. As such, a sticker that usually means the board was repaired by isn't something to note, but thermal paste is. And then once that note has been made, that's all the phone agent is going to ever see.
Instead, this situation is much worse - they sold a known-broken refurbished-at-best motherboard as "open box" (fraud #1), and then rejected the return for fictitious reasons (fraud #2), likely because the RMA inspection tech saw that the motherboard was an unsellable piece of trash and had every incentive to make the customer eat it.
And I don't see how the Gigabyte sticker being there indicates it was not the board originally sent to GN. It's completely plausible that meets the requirements for "open box" at Newegg. And IIRC nowhere on the sticker does it say that the CPU socket is broken, rather that specific history was obtained by calling Gigabyte and asking.