Topic: Graphics Card Scam on E-Bay! GTX 1080 / 1080 Ti and others (Read 166 times)

In any of these scams these days it's more of an inconvenience than something you'll loose money on - in the case of the link above, PayPal won't cancel the transaction until 30 days (or maybe 45 days) have past and the money is unclaimed, or after the money is claimed.  In either case, they still cover you, so you don't need to resort to your bank or anything else - but still a PIA.

I've been buying a bunch of cards off eBay lately, and here's some of the other scams I've seen in the last 30 days or so:

They put in the title or description that it's a "picture" of the item, not the actual item - and then they mail you a picture.  This scam is as old as the hills, and eBay will nuke the seller pretty quickly for a misleading listing, even if they try to argue "but it says picture in the title".  

Next is the seller ships some box full of bogus crap - once again, eBay will handle it, and typically they do it to a bunch of people at the same time.  Lame thing is that you need to accept the box and show the contents, otherwise if you reject receiving the box it's much more of a PIA in their system.

Overseas sellers with super long shipping times - this is them trying to get past the 30 days or so that PayPal holds the money.  Once again, both eBay and PayPal cover you in this instance - just make sure that all your communications always go through eBay.

Here's a particularly interesting one - there actually are fake video cards on ebay, the only ones I've seen are the previous gen, but here's a video to give you an idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ved84d_6occ&t=1s

Obviously not going to be useful for mining.    All the sellers I've seen of these are overseas - and even if you did buy some of these by mistake, eBay will cover you for fake goods.

There's one other scam I've seen a ton, that's cards in the $150-$180 price range - no idea how this scam works or what they're doing, but there's literally always new posts that are very similar, and all in the same kind of weird price range - almost all are overseas, so it might just be some variation on that.

General words of advice - eBay's customer service is awesome, super fast and always helpful, I give them 5 big starts.  PayPal's customer service is about as opposite as you can get - hours of wait time, give zero f's about you, and never can do anything, always requires calling back X number of weeks later and restarting the whole proccess.  Can't wait until eBay kicks them to the curb for that other payment processing company.