Nvidia RTX 4090 scams keep popping up – and the latest is a blatant ‘FrankenGPU’ rip-off purchased on Amazon
Scammers tricking PC gamers with fake RTX 4090 graphics cards are nothing new, but what is what’s new is that we’ve now seen a few in January 2024, when incidents are normally more widespread – and the last one took place in the US.
Tom’s hardware reported that a hardware repair expert on YouTube, North West Repair (NWR), published a video showing a fake RTX 4090 in all its rip-off glory.
The buyer bought it on Amazon – we were told the RTX 4090 was in a pallet deal from Amazon Returns, so it was a GPU that had previously been returned by another buyer – but discovered they had a dead graphics card. So they sent the Lovelace flagship to NWR to be repaired.
However, when NWR went to work on repairing the board, it was discovered that this was not an RTX 4090 at all. In fact, this graphics card had an RTX 4080 board under the hood, and an RTX 4080 chip for that matter, one that looked “baked”, plus several other glaring flaws (more faulty components and missing memory cooling pads).
In short, this wasn’t a real graphics card at all, just a collection of broken bits and pieces or a ‘FrankenGPU’ that wasn’t even based on an RTX 4090, but had the chip from a 4080 as mentioned.
Analysis: Stripped (both the card and the buyer)
What happened here? Well, the scammer was smart enough to make it seem at first glance like this was a credible glitch with an RTX 4090 – they used a melted power connector. So anyone who didn’t delve deep into the internals of the graphics card wouldn’t know what was going on.
Which apparently was the scammer who took all the major parts of the Lovelace graphics card they bought – including the RTX 4090 chip – and replaced them with this mess of broken stuff, before returning the FrankenGPU to Amazon and getting their money back.
As mentioned, this is the second RTX 4090 scam we’ve seen in a month, and while it’s not quite a trend per se, it’s a worrying development. Especially since this took place in the US, and not Asia (where the previous fake originated), this is somewhat alarming for US buyers.
NWR warns that this is something US consumers may see more of, and that the incident is “100% real and now in the US market.” To be fair, we’ve seen these scams before in the US, but the point is, be extra careful with second-hand graphics cards or RTX 4090 returns. Especially now that the price of the flagship has become so high – it is still above $2,000 in the US market (on Newegg at the time of writing).
Clearly, this makes it a ripe target for scams, and PC gamers would certainly do well to wait for the incoming RTX 4080 Super, due out next week (although it already went on sale), to find out. see it as a much more affordable alternative to high-end gaming (with a suggested retail price of $999 in the US, and in line with that elsewhere).
The concern with that new launch, however, is that the stock could fly off the shelves quite quickly, because even if some performance rumors turn out to be true (claiming the Super version will mark a modest increase), it will still be a great value . compared to the vanilla RTX 4080 with that big 20% price drop – and it could very well be a product that ends up in our best graphics cards list.