eBay users are getting back at graphics card scalping bots by listing pictures of the RTX 5090 for $2000, occasionally framed
Another graphics card launch filled with bots, scalpers, and 300% markups. Nvidia's hotly anticipated GPUs, the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, went on sale this week and scalpers have bought as many as they can to sell on for higher prices. Yet there are some seemingly looking to stop them from getting away with it.
To catch out any bots hoovering up these sales, eBay users are now posting fake listings for these graphics cards to trick them.
In both the US and the UK, you can find tonnes of listings for what appears to be an RTX 5090 around the card's MSRP. Many of these also come with a light warning to 'read description' at the end. This clues you into the strange game being played here.
In the description sits a disclaimer that these sellers are actually emailing pictures of RTX cards to unsophisticated bots or even more unsophisticated scalpers, people looking to take advantage of the low supply, high demand situation to resell graphics cards for a pretty penny.
Many of these listings won't physically send you the picture. It's just a jpeg in an email, and not even an NFT (like that'd be worth more anyways). However, one listing says: «the photo detentions [dimensions] is 8 inches by 8 inches, I got the frame from Target. DO NOT BUY IF YOU’RE A HUMAN».
Though I'm tempted to say that none of this amounts to more than just annoying scalpers, some like this $1,200 drawing of an RTX 5090 actually sold a unit in the last 24 hours. This $1,900 entry has also managed to make a sale. Surely these are not purchases made by humans, right? So maybe some bots are out there trying to snap up cards on eBay.
Some listings have got even more creative, like this one that is effectively someone throwing away their clutter. «You will receive a random item in the mail from a donation store. it will be either a book, a water bottle, or whatever else.»
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
No, I don't think «whatever else»
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