Four suspects were arrested by Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) for allegedly selling off Intel CPU samples on eBay for personal financial gain.

The four suspects are all engineers working for Intel's OEM manufacturers in Taiwan, the CIB said in a statement.

According to CIB, the four suspects were selling these sample processors at online auction website ebay for huge profit.

During a raid to the suspects' residents last month in Taoyuan, police authorities confiscated a total of 178 sample CPUs, which is worth around NT$2.5 million according to estimation, the statement said.

The suspects admitted that they had sold over 500 of Intel engineering sample CPUs since 2009 during initiation investigations, the CIB said.

Engineering samples are the beta versions of chips that are meant only to be used for compatibility qualification tests. Typically, they are provided to OEM manufacturers prior to the chips commercial release to allow product development.

Such samples are sold in lower prices that the retail products and are also favored by users for having unlocked multipliers, allowing for easy overclocking.

Intel has not provied any comment.