eBay & Alibaba Scam: Old Video Cards with BIOS Flashed to Appear as Newer Models, some old as 2012.

[TheBlackAdder]

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I was just tooling around Gamer's Nexus and came across an interesting post video, which falls into a, "If something is too good to be true, it probably is" advisory edition.

There are a bunch of on-line sellers hawking "new" Nvidia GTX video cards on the cheap. How can they do that? Well, they just flash the BIOS of an older video card, so your software will think it's a new card, yet it will probably run as slow as the default video chip on your motherboard. It is then packaged in a fugazi box with a suspicious driver/software DVD. This particular model was actually a 650Ti, which runs slower than the 460 benchmarked against it.

Yes, the scam video card is way at the bottom.



Check out the full web post here:
https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3337-ebay-scam-gtx-1050-1gb-gpu-benchmarked

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[MattP]

1. Will not buy anything from Alibaba and very careful on ebay

Alibaba is sketchy as hell, ebay only buy certain things and Amazon you have to make sure it's from legitimate source

[msongs]

2. ditched ebay years ago. alibaba and the forty thieves - that says it all nt

[Initech]

3. We gamers have known about this scam for a while now.

A lot of these bogus GPUs started popping up during the shortage last year. The easiest way to spot one is if you see a brand you don't recognize like "XHVGA". If it's not one of major ones, don't buy it.