ranzware
Another graphics card launch filled with bots, scalpers, and 300% markups. Nvidia’s hotly anticipated GPUs, the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, went on sale this week and scalpers have bought as many as they can to sell on for higher prices. Yet there are some seemingly looking to stop them from getting away with it.
To catch out any bots hoovering up these sales, eBay users are now posting fake listings for these graphics cards to trick them.
In both the US and the UK, you can find tonnes of listings for what appears to be an RTX 5090 around the card’s MSRP. Many of these also come with a light warning to ‘read description’ at the end. This clues you into the strange game being played here.
In the description sits a disclaimer that these sellers are actually emailing pictures of RTX cards to unsophisticated bots or even more unsophisticated scalpers, people looking to take advantage of the low supply, high demand situation to resell graphics cards for a pretty penny.
Many of these listings won’t physically send you the picture. It’s just a jpeg in an email, and not even an NFT (like that’d be worth more anyways). However, one listing says: “the photo detentions [dimensions] is 8 inches by 8 inches, I got the frame from Target. DO NOT BUY IF YOU’RE A HUMAN”.
Though I’m tempted to say that none of this amounts to more than just annoying scalpers, some like this $1,200 drawing of an RTX 5090 actually sold a unit in the last 24 hours. This $1,900 entry has also managed to make a sale. Surely these are not purchases made by humans, right? So maybe some bots are out there trying to snap up cards on eBay.
Some listings have got even more creative, like this one that is effectively someone throwing away their clutter. “You will receive a random item in the mail from a donation store. it will be either a book, a water bottle, or whatever else.”
No, I don’t think “whatever else” entails Nvidia’s latest graphics card.
This new scheme is so effective that, when I search for an RTX 5090 on eBay right now, there is not a single genuine 5090 posting on the entire first page. Though the idea of a scalper losing out on money doesn’t exactly make me feel very sympathetic, I do wonder how much of the claim that these listings are for bots is actually genuine. A big sign saying ‘read description’ is a tell that what you’re buying isn’t real but many of the listings don’t even go this far.
I’ve seen multiple in my search (like this one) that clarify it’s a picture in the description but not on the listing title. Even then, it’s understandable why a potential buyer might not get all the way to the bottom of the description to see ‘This beautifull piece of technology is just not beautifull in you pc but on your wall so we off this photo you can buy for on your wall.’
Though we can see the plans forming over on Reddit. I’ve seen some commenters creating mockups of listings to encourage others into making their own. Some are using VPNs and burner laptops to post as many listings as possible.
This is not the first graphics launch to elicit this type of posting but it’s the first I’ve personally seen with this degree of prevalence. The RTX 30-series sold out very quickly as it not only launched during the pandemic, which led to chip shortages, but cryptocurrency mining became especially popular around this time, increasing demand.
Scalpers won’t get much sympathy from me, especially when they are trying to sell the card for almost $8,000.
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Kurt Indovina
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