A player buys an Nvidia graphics card. But after some problems, he suspects the worst. And just in time, before his money is gone.
What happened to the player? The user bought an Nvidia RTX 4090 on eBay. In total, he paid about 1,500 US dollars including shipping. He shares this on reddit.
After he paid for the GPU, he started to wait. Soon, days turned into a whole week. But then he found the whole thing suspicious, as the seller had not sold any other items and allegedly offered more than 10 graphics cards.
He eventually wrote to the seller because he wanted to know where his graphics card was. But shortly after, the seller’s eBay account was suspended and no longer existed. This was frustrating because the player had not yet received his GPU.
Player gets lucky and gets his money back
How did the situation turn out? The player eventually called his credit card company and explained the case. The company ultimately reversed the transaction and refunded the user’s money.
The whole action therefore turned out well in the end. However, if the player had not suspected anything in time, his money would likely have been lost. And around 1,200 euros is certainly not a small amount.
What is interesting about the case? eBay initiated some sort of automatic shipping apparatus. Because the buyer received a notification that his package was on its way.
The catch is: The scammer allegedly intentionally used a fake postal code so that the sent item would be delivered to a location that was close enough to meet eBay’s shipping requirements. Otherwise, the error would probably have been noticed earlier. For this reason, the buyer never found out what the scammer actually sent him.
Scams and fraud are widespread in online trading
How can you recognize such offers? In most cases, the offers are way too good to be true. Additionally, there are other indicators of such dangerous deals:
- The imprint and linked websites are often poorly maintained and many years old. Facebook pages often haven’t had a post in years.
- The seller uses a completely new account and has sold nothing yet, or only offers high-priced items.
- The provided phone numbers are unreachable or you end up elsewhere because the provider has since reassigned the number.
- Such scammers often offer a whole range of products at absurd prices, mostly high-priced products. You might find graphics cards alongside dishwashers or branded bicycles.
In many cases, the product description consists only of copied images and the manufacturer’s description. Images that look real are often taken by scammers from old, private listings on eBay, Facebook, or other popular sites.
Not only eBay is affected: And a scammer can also catch you if you buy directly from Amazon in Germany. This happened to a player who ordered a processor on Amazon.de. But in the end, he was scammed: Player orders a gaming processor from AMD on Amazon in Germany, instead receives a nasty fake product
