The new graphics card GeForce RTX 3080 is currently being sold for a lot of money on eBay. Frustrated users are trying to counteract this with fake bids and paper graphics cards.
What is the problem? The brand new powerful graphics card from Nvidia RTX 3080 went on sale on September 17 and was so highly sought after that it sold out within minutes.
Users on reddit reported that they did not even see the “Buy” button on Nvidia’s website before the card was already gone. Immediately after, the first price-gouging offers from scalpers appeared on eBay, who secured a large quantity of graphics cards through buyer bots and now want to sell them for a lot of money.
This major annoyance for gamers was enabled by the bot manufacturer Bounce Alerts, which is currently under heavy fire.
For $75 a month, so-called resellers can access bots through the offer from Bounce Alerts, which help them quickly acquire large quantities of expensive and rare products to sell them at higher prices.
The previously celebrated graphics card and also impressive in tests RTX 3080, due to high demand coupled with limited availability, is a particularly lucrative business for resellers.
On Twitter, some scalpers bragged that they would now sell the coveted graphics cards and received angry reactions for it.
Some users have therefore decided to take matters into their own hands and disrupt the scalpers on eBay.
Users are fighting back with fake offers and bids
Case 1: The fake bids. The prices of the real 3080 offers on eBay are driven up into the five-digit range by bidding bots, so that sellers cannot sell the graphics cards at inflated prices. While prices were still at a maximum of $2,000 on September 18, the maximum price overnight rose to a ridiculous $99,900.
In the German-speaking eBay, it looks similar. The prices of the graphics cards reach 40,000 € and more. However, these sellers will never get that money.
Anyone considering joining the fake bids for fun should better refrain from doing so. These are essentially fraud, and such bids violate eBay’s terms of service.
Case 2: The fake offers. Fake offers for the RTX 3080 are also increasingly appearing on eBay. These offer the image of the card printed or drawn on a piece of paper. Completely unrelated items that have nothing to do with the card also appear.
They are obviously not intended for anyone to buy. The descriptions of these offers ask people to save their money and not to pay the inflated prices, but to wait for a resupply from Nvidia.
If you sort the offers for RTX 3080 by “lowest first”, you will quickly see that a large part of the first page is cluttered with false offers. But even higher up in the price scale, one occasionally stumbles upon calls to deny gougers any chance.
What does Nvidia say? After the pre-sale disaster, Nvidia informed fans that the company would do “everything humanly possible” to stop the botters and gougers. One of the measures is a manual review of all orders. This is supposed to ensure that the graphics cards end up with real customers and not with bots.
Nvidia also asked fans to ignore the offers on eBay. The card is not worth the money. The availability of the RTX 3080 will improve, and retailers will receive resupplies daily. Next week, the next model will also arrive: the RTX 3090.
Nvidia is not the only company currently facing problems with overpriced resales on eBay. Sony also experienced real chaos during the pre-orders of the PS5.
