Taiwanese Cops Raid AMD Chip Thieves

Taiwanese law-enforcement authorities on Dec. 30 raided four businesses suspected of tampering with, or illegally relabeling, AMD processors, AMD officials tell VARBusiness.

"The investigation is ongoing, and we're cooperating with authorities," says AMD spokesperson Cathy Abbinanti. "We're not going to comment on what we believe the origin of the parts was."

The news comes on the heels of reports circulating in the Asian press, which claim that some 60,000 defective processors were stolen from AMD's packaging and assembly plants in Taiwan and were being relabeled by thieves as working chips for sale in Europe.

However, AMD is throwing cold water on those stories.

"The media reports are unsubstantiated and without merit," Abbinanti says. AMD is also declining to link the confirmed raids with the purported thefts.AMD also won't comment on whether the processors at issue were defective, preferring instead to say that they may have been "tampered with and relabeled with inaccurate model numbers."

Regardless of how many processors are at issue--and AMD declines to talk numbers--the salient question for VARs and consumers is whether any of the relabeled CPUs will find their way into the channel. On that score, AMD firmly says no.

"The reports have talked about the German market," Abbinanti says. "At this point, we have no reason to believe the processors were sold in the German or the general European markets." Nor will the chips make it to the United States, AMD adds.

To stay safe, AMD recommends that consumers buy only from authorized distributors and resellers. It also points out that valid processors carry unique serial numbers, which can be checked with the company. And AMD's so-called PIB, or retail processor-in-box parts, come with holograms on the consumer packaging.

Though news of the Asian raids is heating up the Internet this week, stories of chip crimes aren't without precedent. "I don't want to diminish the seriousness of this; we take this very seriously," Abbinanti says. "We had a similar incident in Thailand in November. For whatever reason, that didn't catch on."0