In perfect packaging: NVIDIA RTX 5090 without processor and memory came from French Amazon

A gamer waited a year for MSI’s NVIDIA RTX 5090 graphics card before receiving it from Amazon in France. It’s hard to imagine the degree of disappointment.

The Reddit user Nice-Screen-4193 ordered the MSI RTX 5090 directly from Amazon. From there he received a non-working video card with a missing GPU and memory modules. The order was placed in July 2024 directly with Amazon in France. That is, not from a third-party marketplace seller, but directly from the company.

The packaging was perfect, with no signs of tampering. However, after inspecting the video card, the owner found that four screws around the CPU socket had been removed. On top of that, a fingerprint hinted that the video card had already been used. The video card was purchased and labeled as new. Plugging the video card into the system did not produce any results, not even one of the fans was spinning. The user inspected the card with a flashlight and found the chip and GDDR7 modules missing.

The case shows that even trusted sources are not a guarantee against such fraud. It is likely that the RTX 5090 components were stolen during transportation before reaching Amazon’s warehouses. Therefore, Amazon has very little chance of determining when and how the fraud occurred. Undamaged packaging does not give receivers any reason to doubt the contents of the box.

Due to the extremely high demand for NVIDIA’s flagship graphics cards of the last three generations, they have become a welcome target of numerous attacks by scammers, thieves, and speculators. In recent years, there have been multiple cases of video cards with component swappingand boxes, filled instead with all sorts of junk. It’s not the first time we’ve seen completely intact packaging in such cases. At least some of the frauds are linked to China, which assembles video cards and is experiencing a shortage of AI chips amid US bans.

Source: Tom’s Hardware