Scammers are selling gutted RTX 5090 cards stripped of GPU and VRAM
Imagine dropping thousands on a flagship graphics card only to find out you bought an incredibly expensive metal brick. Yes, the luxury secondhand market has officially entered its "gutted shell" era, and the sheer audacity of these scammers is almost admirable.
A specialized repair technician from the YouTube channel NorthWestRepair received a ZOTAC GeForce RTX 5090 Solid that was dead on arrival. Upon close inspection, the technician noticed the factory warranty seal on the screws was brutally mangled. The real horror show started when he looked at the printed circuit board, which was several shades darker than usual, looking like it had spent too much time in a toaster. This discoloration is a dead giveaway that a scammer blasted the board with a high-temperature heat gun to cleanly desolder the precious silicon without ripping the contacts.
Once the massive cooler was detached, the master's suspicions were confirmed: the board was completely hollowed out. The flagship Nvidia GB202 graphics processor and all the next-generation GDDR7 memory chips were entirely missing. The scammers had left nothing but squishy thermal pads to maintain the physical illusion of a heavy, premium product. Apparently, fan connectors turning from white to toasted gray-brown weren't enough of a clue for the poor soul who bought this expensive paperweight.
This isn't an isolated incident of high-tech grave robbing, as these "dummy" cards are flooding platform inventory across OfferUp, social media marketplaces, and even return pallets. On the flip side, retail scammers are exploiting return policies to rob sellers blind. An eBay merchant named Baily Ecom fell victim to this, receiving a returned $4,000 ZOTAC card completely stripped of its VRAM chips. Meanwhile, others have received a box of literal rocks from Best Buy instead of an Asus RTX 5080, or a towel and stones in place of a $3,000 MSI RTX 5090 Suprim via Amazon Resale.
The ultimate irony is that buying a top-tier GPU has transformed from a simple gaming upgrade into an extreme survival sport where major retailers and shady local sellers alike might just send a box of premium gravel. Silicon has officially become the new gold, and the wild west of hardware retail is only getting started.
Source: Wccftech
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