GeForce RTX 5090 For $1699? Beware Of Scam Listings On Amazon
Yes, we're really at a point where spending $1,699 on a flagship graphics card would be considered a heck of a deal. Hell, even finding one priced at NVIDIA's baseline $1,999.99 MSRP (GeForce RTX 5090) would be considered a major score. With that in mind, don't fall for scammers on Amazon listing NVIDIA's top gaming GPU for less than MSRP, let alone several hundred dollars less.
While that may seem obvious to more savvy users and anyone who follows the tech scene closely, it might not be so apparent to the more casual shopper and/or someone new the PC gaming scene who's looking to build a dream machine. To wit, a user in the PCMR group on Facebook posted an image of an Amazon listing for a Gigabyte Aorus GeForce RTX 5090 Master Ice graphics card that appeared to be marked down 38% to $1,699.
The custom card normally retails for $2,749.99, as the listing also indicates, but given that Amazon was in the midst of its Bring Spring Deal event, we can see how a less savvy shopper might think it's a legitimate price reduction.
"I think Amazon just made the biggest goof. Buy it, it's fake? Return and get a refund. Or, the biggest come up of the year," the original poster wrote on Facebook.
The listing did actually appear on Amazon (it wasn't a Photoshop job), but as others in the thread pointed out, it's an attempt to scam buyers by an unscrupulous marketplace seller. One of the commenters posted another Amazon listing for the same card with an even more enticing price—$1,199 by a marketplace seller with the handle ZURAB KARDENAKHISVILI.
It should go without saying that you should always be wary of marketplace seller listings, especially when the price appears to be too good to be true. At the same time, we're in agreement with Overclock3D that Amazon can and should do more to vet these types of listings. We've seen scams like this before, and while it's a mammoth undertaking to vet them all, Amazon should at least have a process in place to verify special cases.
This would qualify as a special case, given the state of the GPU market right now. The GeForce RTX 5090 is one of the most difficult products to find in stock, even with NVIDIA's add-in board partners slapping hefty premiums on their custom models.
Additionally, the seller mentioned above was new to Amazon. That's another potential vetting point for Amazon, especially on high-dollar and/or low-stock items. And with companies investing heavily and hyping up everything AI these days, surely there is an AI-based solution that Amazon could employ to detect obvious (to savvy users) scams like this one. Or are we just using AI to build chatbots and sell GPUs?
We can complain until we're blue in the face, but these kinds of scams are likely to keep happening. So, fair or not, the onus is pretty much entirely on the buyer to avoid being swindled. Caveat emptor and all that.
