Amazon sold a fake RTX 4090 FrankenGPU cobbled together using a 4080 GPU and board — scam card was found in a returns pallet deal

sorghum@sh.itjust.works to Technology@lemmy.world – 153 points – Amazon sold a fake RTX 4090 FrankenGPU cobbled together using a 4080 GPU and board — scam card was found in a returns pallet deal
tomshardware.com

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PCc2Ug2dXmY

Customer purchased Asus Rog 24GB 4090 from amazon but received fake 4080 instead

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Someone bought a pallet of returned products and found this as one of the returned products. So what?

It is important to note that this pretty useless concoction of non-working parts – dressed up as one of the best graphics cards available to consumers in 2024 – wasn’t sold as a new model. It was received by an NWR customer in a pallet deal from Amazon Returns.

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We can’t know for sure, but the product received by NWR, apparently from an Amazon pallet deal, may have been an Amazon return where a faulty Franken-graphics-card was returned and someone kept a good working one. The outward description of a cracked PCB and melted power connector might even suggest another level of deception used to return this switched product.

Seems to me like either Amazon sold the scam product that the customer returned since it wasn't what they ordered, or the original customer did a switcheroo with some broken card. That would be the pertinent part of the story for me.

As far as the pallet buyer is concerned it's a swing and a miss and they probably should move on.

It was likely return fraud and is super common with PC components. The logic is, is that your average customer service rep doesn't know how to correctly identify parts that are being returned and doesn't give a shit about the return as long as the customer doesn't throw a fit. I would imagine this is still the case with Amazon since there is little human interaction.

I worked with a kid at CompUSA who did that with GPUs. He got arrested, or at least, escorted out of the store in handcuffs. Back then, and I don't know about now, most retail stores had an RMA cage where one or two people worked comparing part number and serials for expensive part returns. When your name is on the receipt and you work at the same store, you are gonna have a bad time.

The return items aren't inspected thoroughly before getting tossed into these pallet auctions. Any open-box return goes straight to them, which enables all kinds of return fraud like this.

I had this happen to me. Bought a 980ti warehouse deal, came in a 980ti box, plugged it in and it was a 980. Amazon took it back without issue. I'm assuming that I received a fraudulent return, and I'd assume the same thing with this 4090. Especially because this was in a return pallet deal, meaning, you know, it was returned to Amazon. We have no idea what Amazon actually sold in the first place.

My guess is someone at amazon swapped it and kept or sold the real gpu

If you've never seen an Amazon, FedEx, or UPS facility, you know this is just not likely. They are more secure than prisons. You're not allowed any personal belongings going through to the staging areas, they have metal detectors and multiwave scanners like airports.

Not only that, some items are in fucking literal jails, whole fenced rooms that requiere individual identificación to get in. Last I worked there, it was for expensive but small items with high risk of internal thieving, but with the price of this cards I believe they might apply