Blue Ridge rapped for false statement

Mail-order reseller Blue Ridge has been cautioned by Intel for the second time in three months after it was caught making misleading claims in its advertising.

The Doncaster reseller was contacted by Intel in July after the chip vendor was alerted that Blue Ridge was advertising Cyrix processors using the Pentium trademark.

Last week, Intel sent the company a second letter following a complaint by a customer that it was passing off incompatible motherboards as genuine Intel components.

Simon Warner, who purchased an incompatible system on 3 October, said: 'The machine I bought simply did not work. It was delivered a week late and I was charged twice. When I requested a refund I was told I would be charged a 25 per cent restocking fee.

'I have spoken to the Trading Standards Office (TSO) and the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), who tell me that a restocking fee must be declared in the advert and cannot be charged anyway because the goods must be in perfect working order.'

Benoit Philippe, Intel's legal representative for trade-mark enforcement, said: 'We have received no feedback from Blue Ridge about this and no explanation as to its actions. Our primary goal is to protect the consumer.

We advised Mr Warner to contact the TSO and said we would support him in his efforts.'

Another Blue Ridge customer said: 'I bought two machines from Blue Ridge and the build quality was probably the worst I have ever seen. One had sound cables the wrong way around and the second system had a dead hard disk and faults on the memory and system board.

Blue Ridge declined to comment.