«Two weeks of stress»: eBay buyer soldered chips out of RTX 4090 and returned an empty board

An engineer from the United States told us how he was in a state of stress for two weeks after someone bought a used Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 video card from him on eBay and then brazenly returned it… without the GPU and memory chips – they were simply soldered off the board. After the purchase, it was almost immediately returned with the wording «no image».

The user Reddit with the nickname Piscian19 reported that he had sold a «almost new» GeForce RTX 4090 on eBay. He was immediately suspicious of the buyer — it was a large account with an online storefront and a business address in California.

And, as it turned out, not in vain: the buyer almost immediately initiated a return procedure on eBay, demanding compensation for the «dead» video card.

After receiving the return, Piscian19 immediately noticed that the card had damage to the metal mount and problems with the cables. Fortunately, the seller had taken a lot of photos before sending it, and the card was indeed in perfect condition. Upon return, it only resembled its miserable shadow.

Eventually, the engineer contacted eBay and reported the problem. But while the case was pending, he decided to disassemble the card to better understand the extent of the damage. It was then that he realized that the brazen buyer had soldered the GPU and memory chips out of the card.

Fortunately, this story ended well: eBay eventually refunded the emotionally exhausted seller.

The best graphics cards are still hard to come by at a reasonable price, so cases of fraud on the secondary market are only increasing. If you’re selling or buying video cards secondhand — take a cue from Piscian19. Document the sale and shipment process to protect yourself. But buyers should also be careful — there can be dishonest players on both sides of the game.

Source: tomshardware