A player ordered an RTX 4090 on Amazon, currently the fastest graphics card from Nvidia. However, when he opened the package, he was quite surprised, as the graphics card has no ports. The community explained to him that he had fallen for a fake product.
Most assume that if you order directly from Amazon, there is generally little that can go wrong with an order. But it was different for a gamer. Because the user WhoRuleTheWorld ordered an RTX 4090 on Amazon (via reddit.com).
But the graphics card he eventually unpacked had no ports. The community quickly explained to him that he hadn’t received a graphics card at all.
Gamer receives cooling plate instead of graphics card
What exactly happened? The user ordered an RTX 4090 from the manufacturer Zotac for around 1,700 Euros. He used a marketplace deal but ordered directly from Amazon. This is also shown by his screenshots, which show Amazon.ca as the seller.
When he opened his package at home, he realized that the graphics card has no ports at all. In fact, he did not receive a graphics card, but a backplate with cooling.
The board with the graphics chip, which usually lies between the backplate and the cooling system, seems to have been swapped by someone. Some joke in the comments that another buyer must have snatched the graphics card for their water-cooled system and returned the empty cooler.
What happens next? The user naturally contacted Amazon afterwards to resolve the issue. He himself took both photos and a video of unpacking the graphics card to secure himself. Because otherwise, Amazon might still believe that he swapped the graphics card.
Scams and fraud with graphics cards are becoming more frequent on Amazon
What is the problem with such a fraud? At first glance, the purchased product and the seller appear reliable. The exchange in the box is often only noticed by the next buyer at worst. Or they may not notice it, and they are just surprised by the performance of their new GPU, which is much weaker than expected.
Here it was the former case: Because the bought graphics card is actually “only” a part of the real graphics card. Who swapped the product cannot be determined with certainty anymore. Many say, however, that Amazon must check such returns from other buyers much more carefully. Otherwise, the next buyer has to bear the loss.
Other scammers use different tricks and try to lure the buyer away from Amazon with various tricks.
Can you protect yourself against this? Many people therefore now give the advice to make a video when unpacking particularly expensive hardware:
- Because if you then have fake goods or simply the wrong product in your hands, you at least have evidence on your side.
- Moreover, you can prove that you did not swap the goods, but that someone before you must have been the villain.
Such evidence does not always help, as a story from a family father shows. Because he also received a wrong GPU on Amazon, but Amazon refused to provide a refund:
