If you value your sanity, don’t try to buy a new graphics card on eBay right now. I had to take a peek at it on Monday and it’s, to use the technical parlance of my profession, a shitshow. In addition to the usual scalpers trying to make a small fortune off of already expensive GPUs, a new scam tactic has appeared for the red-hot Nvidia RTX 5090 and 5080 cards.
It goes like this, according to Alex Blake of Digital Trends. The listing shows a new card at retail price or just above. For the sake of the RTX 5090/5080, and on eBay specifically, this is literally too good to be true — even selling a $2,000 GPU on eBay for sticker price would put a seller well into the red after shipping and seller fees.
But that’s not the point. Allegedly, the listing is “to fool the bots.” In the description, it says the auction is actually selling a photo of the graphics card. The trick, according to the lister, is to fool people who are trying to buy low and sell high through automated systems, getting them to buy something worthless instead.
“You’re buying a photo” or “it’s just the box” is an old scam going back decades on eBay. And it’s absolutely against the website’s policies, no matter how much the title says to “read the description.” The sellers/scammers are trying to run the same old game under a veneer of consumer activism, according to Blake.
eBay
But anyone who’s using an automated bot to buy in-demand electronics at low prices is using them on retail sites to scoop up stock before human buyers have a chance to. They aren’t running the same scam on eBay or other secondary markets — that’s where the scalpers cash out, not where they go hunting. Nope, these listings are almost certainly aiming to fool human shoppers into spending thousands on something worthless, hoping that a relatively low price will get them to buy before their skepticism can kick in.
A few of these phony sales have apparently gone through, but eBay is well aware of this chicanery. A few of the $2,000 “read the description” listings were already scrubbed from the site when I went through to the actual auction. And if you happen to buy one of these photos masquerading as a product, you’d have a legitimate case for fraud protection from your bank or chargeback via credit card or eBay… but it might be months before you actually recover your money.
eBay is already removing many of these phony listings, so fast you can’t even click on them.
eBay
Scams are always rife on the internet, and never more so than when expensive commodities are in high demand. Be careful, be patient, and try to avoid secondary sellers if you can.