Another day, and another victim has been scammed out of an RTX 5090, this time from Amazon in France. Nice-Screen-4193 on the PCMasterRace subreddit shared their story of how they ordered an MSI RTX 5090 directly from Amazon and still managed to get an RTX 5090 with a missing GPU core and memory modules.
The Redditor revealed that they ordered an MSI RTX 5090 graphics card directly from Amazon in France in July 2024. The graphics card came directly from Amazon and was not listed under a third-party seller.
After waiting over a year, they finally received the RTX 5090 they ordered. The box was allegedly perfectly sealed with no signs of tampering. However, once the GPU was inspected, the redditor discovered the four screws surrounding the GPU core had been stripped. Additionally, the gold finger on the bottom allegedly looked dull and used, suggesting to them that the GPU was used and not new.
The redditor hooked up the “used” RTX 5090 to his setup and lo and behold the GPU failed to power up, with not so much as a single fan spinning. The GPU’s power failure finally led to the Redditor peeking under the hood at the insides of the GPU with a flashlight and discovering the RTX 5090 was completely missing a GPU core and GDDR7 memory modules.
The Redditors’ demise reveals that even official GPU listings on Amazon are not safe from thieves and scammers. It is very likely that RTX 5090 inventory was hijacked in transit before reaching Amazon’s warehouses, which would give Amazon virtually no identifiers to tell whether its GPU inventory has been hijacked or not. This is especially the case if the boxes appear untampered, as was the case with this latest report.
Thanks to sky-high demand caused by the AI boom, Nvidia’s flagship GPUs over the past three generations have been at the helm of non-stop attacks from scammers, thieves, and scalpers trying to take advantage of the sky-high prices Nvidia’s flagship GPUs command. We’ve seen everything from RTX 4090 inventory being sold with RTX 3090s inside, to RTX 5090 packages being filled with macaroni, rice, and an obsolete GPU tucked in.
Another GPU scam that has become popular with scammers is to remove the GPU core and memory altogether from retail graphics cards. By doing this, the scammers can flip the GPU core and memory modules for a profit or retrofit another graphics card with the stolen components. The latter has become popular in China, where RTX 5090 dies and GDDR7 memory modules are being transplanted onto slimmer blower-style graphics cards compatible with AI servers.
Not all of these frakenstined RTX 5090s are using stolen components, but it is very likely that at least some of them are using stolen components.
