NVIDIA RTX 30 series graphics cards or Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards, Ryzen 5000 processors, and newer PS5 and Xbox Series X / S consoles experienced uptime issues from the first minute, largely due to resellers that they took to make huge profits the second. hand market. A January report showed resellers sold more than 53,000 NVIDIA and AMD graphics worth $ 65 million, numbers that will be even higher now.
Selling “images” of RTX 30 and PS5 to avoid bots?
Right now there are many RTX 3080 and 3090 graphics cards for sale on second-hand sites like eBay with prices the same as the manufacturer’s MSRP, but it goes without saying that purchasing one of them between them will likely result in disappointment if you don’t. read the fine print, because the strategy behind it is that the seller is literally selling an image of the product and not the product itself.
These types of sales have been around for a long time on eBay, and it is something that became widespread when the Sony PS5 console was launched, fooling many desperate parents willing to pay a fortune to buy a PS5 for their children. What’s different now is that with graphics cards they are directly warning people not to buy, claiming it’s a trap for robots.
Humans are not allowed! Only buy if you are a robot or end up buying a digital artwork from the map as a banner of current market conditions ”.- reads one of the announcements.
Anything that punishes resellers who claim to take advantage of the situation is to be welcomed, but it’s easy to imagine that many of these ads include “bot only” messages to cover their backs in the event of fraudulent sales, especially since they have anti-fraud policies. “No refunds, no returns.” And surely a lot of innocent people who don’t fully read the ad end up biting and paying for an image.
By the way, with graphics cards, things have gone further: in addition to selling images of the product, there have been advertisements selling 3D prints of the graphics card, or even just its original empty packaging.
Always read the fine print
These types of scams, bogus sales or whatever you want to call them make the excuse that they do it like this to avoid fraudulent bot purchases, but since they have a no return or refund policy, a lot people will certainly have fallen and they will have had a good time money for it. The point is, if they don’t state in the product description that they are sending an image (or whatever it is in each case), they would be committing a crime of fraud and you could report it to the police.
For this reason, everyone states in the description what you are actually buying (so you can’t point it out), so you should always, always read the entire ad before you buy, and especially if you look for an RTX 30 or PS5 graphics console, which seem to be the products most affected by this “technique”.
