When you say you've researched this and there are loads of people complaining about problems, you do realise that these people complaining are a very small number of people? I was in your boat as well for their PSUs and while many complained about coil whine, I was informed that I am only reading the critisism and not the praise. Why else would most people post their positive experience? Since thats what supposed to happen right? Most people tend to be happy with the product and get on with their lives or they get a faulty one and get mad over it (understandable). This is probably why you think MANY people have this problem
They sell far more boards than they receive RMAs (says the reps on the Corsair forums).
Those people including you may have gotten a bad batch of K90s but its so small that Corsair wouldnt even think of removing these from retailers. This is NOT a scam and they are perfectly good keyboards that they sell.
I see people have told you to speak to OCUK about the shipping fees and have you done it yet?
Also, over at the Corsair forums, RAMGuy says that you pay the shipping fees and they refund you back. Once again, talk to the people about the shipping fees etc. Nothing to get so mad about really.
If you get word that they say they will NOT reimburse your shipping fees, then theres something in all this that i can feel for you
EDIT: Forgot to mention, most people highly rate Corsairs RMA service and when people do get repeated faulty batches, upgrades are normally given out.
I'm basing my info on the sheer number of complaints I read though pages and pages of them when I google this issue. Added to the fact that some individuals are on their 3rd+ return that is defective.
I've worked in IT for nearly 10 years, and I've built my own and many other peoples computers by hand for 18 years now. I've only ever had to RMA a handful of things all of which were replaced with working products, most of those RMAs had local return address and the good businesses with actual good RMA departments dispatch a courier at THEIR expense to fix THEIR mistake.
I've literally NEVER before now heard of anyone having to RMA something 3 times in a row to get a good product, much less MULTIPLE people having to do this. It's clearly more than just a few dodgy products, the odds needing to RMA something 3x in a row are astronomical for a supposed small failure rate. What compounds this is that a £120 keyboard should be a reliable product, it should have good build quality because this is a LOT of money for a god damn keyboard.
I've badgered Corsair about this, they told me to **** off essentially, so I told them it's unreasonable to expect me to ship this back internationally, they don't care. They just do not care.
I'll speak to OCUK later about this, right now I'm too infuriated about being constantly messed around to possibly be polite, and OCUK staff don't deserve that.
Yea it is a scam to sell a low quality product at a high price premium, then when customers want to return it tell them they have to phone customer services overseas on a premium rate number, and then ship the product back internationally at my expense, basically deliberately awkward RMA process designed to just suck more and more money out of the customer until basically it becomes more money than it's worth to actually replace the product.
This is the worst RMA process I've dealt with by a country mile, in my 18 years of hand building PCs for myself, many friends and family members.