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Nvidia’s RTX 50-Series GPU They are here and some absolutely crazy price labels come with them. Farrilize the top of the range RTX 5090? This will be $ 2,000, please. And we’re not even talking about third parties, with some of which have prices increasing over $ 3,000.
And just like the clockwork, the scalpers intervened to click every last card and resell them on eBay for even more resource prices, because what is to start a GPU without a healthy dose of pain and shortage? Still, this time the scammers have a new trick in their sleeves and you have to make sure you are not falling for it.
During the Covid pandemic, the graphic processors were difficult to find when the world supply chain turned off. Scalpers and cheaters openly and proudly listed their wicked goods for high prices without even bothering to excuse their behavior. As you would expect, people were not happy.
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This time, the scalpers have a new tactic and seems to be created to generate understanding among random observers, perhaps even sympathy. In fact, check out eBay today and you will probably find multiple lists with some variations of the following title: “NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 32GB (read the description).”
And why should you read the description? Because there the seller explains usefully that they do not really sell a graphics card. No, they sell a photo of the card. Why, you ask? Well, This is a measure to fight botOf course! How much thought.
In such cases, the seller tries to frame his apparent fraud as a truly pro-consuming activism. They sell a photo with a misleading list of the list, explaining to lubricate scalping bots in losing their money to a non -existent product. “Don’t turn us off, ebay,” they say. “We are the good guys!”
Except, they are obviously not. This is not consumer activism, it’s just a scam. The hope is that buyers desperate for a sold card will just read the “RTX 5090” part, see that the seller has positive reviews and will hit Buy button. Easy money for the cheater and a world of pain for the buyer.
And it works. During writing I found Two ads sold In the past day for a photo of the RTX 5090 and this is only among the lists that are still active. If you scroll the items sold on eBay, you will find dozens of RTX 5090 photos sold, all of which run around the $ 2000 list price. Ebay can return the money to buyers and sellers can be punished, but does that change the reality that this is a fraud? I think no.
How to avoid being cheated
The first and most obvious warning sign on these lists is right there in the title. If a title in the list contains the words “Read the description”, it suggests that something is not quite as it should be, and that you cannot take the product description by its word. Use this as your first clue.
The second is that these lists and their titles often contain unusual or non -standard fonts. This seems to be an attempt to avoid automated filters and eBay detection systems, and this is something you will find regularly among the garbage in your spam folder by email. If the seller has taken the time to add strange and unusual fonts, something shady can happen.
In addition, each of these false graphics card sellers has spent time carefully by building his reputation on eBay to assure the candidates that they are legal. The lazy will just buy some cheap items and we hope that no one can notice that there is zero feedback as a seller. The more complicated GPU scammers will take more time, such as the one who was selling commercial cards, so their reviews were full of buyers who praised them on their “great cards”.
A few years ago, I was a victim of GPU fraud on eBay. I wanted to buy the NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti (I show my age here) and found one listed near MSRP. The seller had 100% positive reviews (admitted, a relatively low number of reviews – another red flag), so I felt comfortable deal with them. In the end, I paid for a graphic processor that never arrived, and it took me a months in controversial with eBay to get my money back. It was so difficult that I almost gave up.
You see all these distinctive features in today’s fake ads for “Anti-Bot”. If you come across any of these warning signs, be extremely cautious. When this lot of money is on the line, it is more fierce to report the list of fraud and move on.
And if nothing else, the emergence of these frauds shows how many work companies like NVIDIA and Ebay have to do to prevent innocent people from deceiving themselves. If regular buyers are not able to buy a product before selling themselves on scalpers and if it is a child’s game to get lists of fraud hosted on eBay, something has gone wrong.
