February
2022
Dovel & Luner Files Lawsuit Against G.Skill Over Deceptive Advertising
February 1, 2022 — SANTA MONICA – The Dovel & Luner law firm filed a class action lawsuit against G. Skill in federal court on behalf of consumers who purchased high-speed computer memory from G. Skill. The lawsuit alleges that G. Skill misled hundreds of thousands of consumers by deceptively advertising and packaging its high-speed computer memory.
The Complaint, filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, claims that G. Skill violated the consumer protection laws of many states, including the California Unfair Competition Law, the California False Advertising Law, and the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act. According to the lawsuit, G. Skill’s advertisements and packaging for its high-speed memory products misleads consumers about the actual performance of G. Skill’s memory.
G. Skill advertises that its memory products, including G. Skill’s “Tridents” and “Ripjaws” product lines, run at faster-than-standard speeds—as high as 3600 MHz. According to the lawsuit, a reasonable consumer would understand G. Skill’s advertisements and packaging to mean that G. Skill’s memory will run at the stated speed out of the box, and that it will do so reliably across platforms. Here is an example of a listing for G. Skill’s “Ripjaws ‘3600 MHz memory’” stick, which advertises that the stick operates at “3600 MHz”:
“In reality” however, the lawsuit claims, “G. Skill’s memory sticks do not operate at the advertised speed when plugged into a computer. Rather, they operate at a lower speed.” To get the memory to run at the advertised speed, a customer must “overclock” the memory, which involves “altering the PC’s firmware” in order to “push computer components beyond their standard operating speeds.”
To make matters worse, the lawsuit alleges, “overclocking” doesn’t always work. Rather, the lawsuit claims, overclocking “carries a substantial risk that the memory will not run at the advertised speed or will not run stably at this speed.” And what’s more, “[a]ltering the computer’s firmware in this way poses material risks to the functionality of the computer system, as well as to the memory sticks themselves. Some examples include reducing computer system stability, causing crashes, overheating system components, and causing system components to degrade more quickly.”
None of this information, the lawsuit claims, is disclosed to consumers in G. Skill’s packaging or advertisements. “And this is not information that a reasonable G. Skill customer already knows. A typical purchaser of G. Skill High-Speed Memory is not a computer expert (much less an overclocking expert). Rather, a typical purchaser of G. Skill High-Speed Memory is a regular consumer simply looking to improve the performance of their computer games or media software.”
“The lawsuit alleges that G. Skill misled its customers about its products so that it could charge more for them, and that this violated consumer protection laws,” said Simon Franzini of Dovel & Luner. “We and our co-counsel at Kneupper & Covey, LLP brought this lawsuit to stop this misleading labeling and to compensate consumers who overpaid for G. Skill’s products.”
The lawsuit seeks to enjoin G. Skill from continuing to engage in these deceptive practices and to require that G. Skill compensate harmed consumers.
CONTACT:
Simon Franzini
SOURCE Dovel & Luner, LLP
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