Recently, a Reddit user posted about their unfortunate experience buying an RTX 5090 at half price. They purchased a white Gigabyte AORUS RTX 5090 for 14,916 AED (approximately 29,000 RMB) from Amazon UAE.
The card was sold through Amazon's official resale channel, Amazon Resale, at roughly half the market price. However, upon receipt, it became clear that the graphics card showed obvious signs of being repaired or tampered with.
According to reports, the original poster mentioned having previously purchased second-hand items on Amazon. Seeing this card, he didn't think twice. Believing Amazon's official resale channel to be more reliable than unknown third-party sellers, he placed the order directly.
Upon receiving the package, he noticed some wear on the outer packaging, but since it was second-hand, he didn't pay much attention at the time. Moreover, the accessories looked fine after unboxing.
The scam was only revealed when he removed the graphics card. A small connector near the power interface had come loose, and upon flipping it over, he found several fan connectors disconnected. These signs led him to suspect the card had been disassembled, with its core chip swapped out and stolen.
Subsequently, the original poster decided to inspect the graphics card further. When removing the cooler, he found the mounting screws very loose, clearly indicating the card had been disassembled. There were also obvious traces of thermal material on the cooler, and the most valuable core chip was missing.
In short, this is a typical core-swapping scam. The scammers first acquire brand-new RTX 5090 cards, disassemble them, use professional equipment to remove the most expensive GB202 core and GDDR7 VRAM, then reassemble the cooler and a discarded PCB before returning the item to Amazon.
Since platform inspection staff often lack hardware expertise, they only check for external issues before relisting the items. The original poster has currently requested a return from Amazon but has not yet received a clear response regarding the refund.
