Buyers Beware: "Counterfeit" Raspberry Pis with Failing RAM Surface From an Unauthorized Reseller

Buyers of Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers are advised to be on the alert for too-good-to-be-true deals as prices rocket in the face of continuing global RAM shortages — with reports of "counterfeit" units with uncertified RAM modules hitting selected markets and failing shortly after purchase.

"I am an independent engineer and a long‑time user of single‑board computers," writes Alexy Fedorovich in a post to the Raspberry Pi forums. "I am writing this to warn the community about a documented case of counterfeit Raspberry Pi 5 boards. Please be extremely careful when buying Raspberry Pi boards from third‑party sellers on marketplaces that do not thoroughly verify their supply chains."

Raspberry Pi has been making headlines of late for less-than-positive reasons: ongoing price hikes, unlikely to be reversed in the short term, as the demand for memory to drive the large language models (LLMs) behind the artificial intelligence (AI) bubble outstrips supply. Some sellers, it seems, have taken matters into their own hands and started producing units with uncertified RAM modules — not "fakes," per se, but not the modules with for which the single-board computers were designed.

In Fedorovich's case, the Raspberry Pi — purchased from a Russian marketplace called Wildberries — appeared to work just fine at first glance, until an update triggered its failure. "The board failed irrecoverably during a routine firmware update," the engineer explains, "with the 7–9‑blink error code, an official diagnostic indicator of SDRAM failure." Communication with the seller returned, in translation, a claim that "two out of 10 units" from the same batch had failed in the same way, though that doesn't mean the other eight were made with the correct RAM — just that they haven't failed yet.

From Fedorovich's report, it seems that the "counterfeit" units are genuine Raspberry Pi boards — with Broadcom refusing to sell the BCM2712 system-on-chip to any other customer — which have most likely been purchased with the minimum amount of memory possible then the chips swapped out for higher-capacity versions. It's a hack that has a history, and it often works — but not if component shortages or a desire for higher profits mean you're using RAM that doesn't meet the requirements of the board.

Raspberry Pi engineer James Hughes has confirmed that the company is "aware of the situation," and hints at mitigations being put in place — the details of which "will not be made public," but that could feasibly include firmware-level component verification that would look a lot like the sudden failure on update reported by Fedorovich. Hughes' advice: "Buying from official [Raspberry Pi] resellers avoids any counterfeiting issues," though that's impossible for Fedorovich as Raspberry Pi does not sell into the Russian market due to ongoing sanctions against the nation.

More information is available on the Raspberry Pi forum.