RTX 3080 “Paper Edition” eBay scam

[Bombastinator]

3 hours ago, HanZie82 said:

If people are so stupid they pay 800 bucks for a piece of paper (if its clearly noted like in the examples) they deserve everything they get.

It seems that this is an attempt to decieve.  It actually worked on one viewer here already as apparently part of it is the concept of complaints about a “paper launch” so the people who are falling for it may be doing so because the term “paper” in this case has multiple meanings.  So it’s potentially a crime of misinterpretation of multiple meanings of a word on the part of the buyer that earns an $800 fine collected by anyone willing to try to decieve  them.  Let’s compare this to the concept of mugging.  “You deserve to be punished for walking around here after dark.  The fine is everything you’ve got in your wallet and a beating.  I will be collecting”

 

So simply rephrasing the concept of mugging makes it OK?

[Kisai]

On 9/18/2020 at 4:54 AM, Toxiclegend said:

This reminds me of the whole people who paid for air guitars ages ago..

eBay has a "no item" policy. Selling "air guitars", "bag/jar of air", "ghost in a jar", and similar unprovable things is a one-way street to banville.

 

As long as there is physically something there, and it's not misrepresented, it's fine. At worst these will get keyword spam taken down if they're in the computer category.

[Bombastinator]

35 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

This isn't a scam because the seller is telling you what you're getting in the description.  They tell you that it's not a real GPU and a picture.  If you fail to read the description then that is on you.   Had the seller failed to make mention of this then yes it is a scam, but it's not their fault you failed to read.   They didn't false nor mislead in the advertising sense because they told you straight up what you are getting.   If they straight up promised you a real 3080 then sent the picture then ya, you got scammed via false advertising.   If they said, "ya totally going to send you a 3080" that could be considered misleading advertising.

There’s another thread on this subject that posed the best argument I’ve seen so far in defense of “paper edition” sellers.  The way it went was the whole purpose of the paper edition thing was to attack the buyer bots trying to corner the market on Nvidia cards.  The argument is it’s not so much a scam as a meta scam.  There is an argument for this.  The problem is apparently it was done too close to the bone, and real people are getting caught too.  I’m not so worried personally about the buyers.  Crime victims very rarely get their belongings back, though in this case it may happen more often than normal.  Going after the victimizer is generally job #1.  Here is going to be the problem:  if a person selling a “paper edition” caught a real person who wasn’t a bot or a flipper they victimized someone.  

There is a reason vigilante justice is illegal.  There is a very long history of vigilante justice.  We know how it goes.  It goes poorly.  The most famous version of vigilante justice has a name.  It’s called “lynching”.   You may remember lynching as being a famously not good thing.   It gets the wrong people, it punishes over harshly, it tramples facts and reality.

 

Basically it sucks.  

it’s so bad it’s got a rep for not infrequently even being instigated BY the people who committed the original crime.

 

The cry seems to be “but we’re lynching bots!”

if ALL they get is bots it’s perhaps not so bad.  It’s not looking like that is what is happening though.  It’s not OK. 

[SansVarnic]

This is not the first time this scam has been done on Ebay. The RTX3080 is just the most recent "victim".

[Bombastinator]

5 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Um, you get your money back if you're the buyer on eBay.   eBay and Paypal always side with the buyer even if the buyer is outright lying.   That's a known thing.   As for the rest, how exactly is the normal person a victim?   They failed to read what they were getting, it was stated several times, and at best they were trigger happy due to the category yet that's on them.  If I walk into Walmart, someone moved a candy bar into the fruit section, and I bought it assuming it was a fruit when clearly it wasn't does that make me a victim?  No, it wouldn't.  That's my fault for assuming candy was a fruit and for not reading what I was buying.  I've also seen people argue it violates the site's policy.   That's great, but a website's policy is not a law.   Amazon has several polices themselves that they treat as law, but they aren't laws and some of them actually contradict the law.   I've pointed that out to an executive of their company before.  I know what lynching and vigilante justice are too.

The eBay buyer thing may have a bit of merit, and to me at least is evidence that eBay has seen this stuff before as @SansVarnic points out. 
The rest isn’t just crap though it’s sad crap.  This argument about there not actually being any victims has been tried multiple times already in this very thread. It fails epically.  The same way that argument has always failed for hundreds upon hundreds of years.  I’m going to call it asked and answered.

[SansVarnic]

14 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

<snip>

3 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

<snip>

If you think about this would be referred to as a successful scam as pictures would indicate they do title it "Paper <product name>" and so Ebay in some way can defend the seller as the item is listed correctly. Those that purchase and cry foul are only dumb enough not to read the title and description. I dont have linkable examples but iirc when this happened before some buyers admitted they purchased based on the photo only, not reading the description so refund was awarded.

 

And that was the scam, sellers banked that people were not going to read and just buy based on the photo, and they gambled well. Of course once that became public knowledge the sales pretty much stopped, people in general tend to forget and thusly here we go again and I am sure Ebay will probably side with the seller as the item is properly labeled. People buy it assuming one thing are just going to have to learn the same again at their own expense and the scammers get their money.

 

/shrug

 

[Bombastinator]

7 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

If you think about this would be referred to as a successful scam as pictures would indicate they do title it "Paper <product name>" and so Ebay in some way can defend the seller as the item is listed correctly. Those that purchase and cry foul are only dumb enough not to read the title and description. I dont have linkable examples but iirc when this happened before some buyers admitted they purchased based on the photo only, not reading the description so refund was awarded.

 

And that was the scam, sellers banked that people were not going to read and just buy based on the photo, and they gambled well. Of course once that became public knowledge the sales pretty much stopped, people in general tend to forget and thusly here we go again and I am sure Ebay will probably side with the seller as the item is properly labeled. People buy it assuming one thing are just going to have to learn the same again at their own expense and the scammers get their money.

 

/shrug

 

The problem with the “paper edition” thing seems to be there’s a conflation with the term “paper launch” which is a less well known term.   Microsoft caught this one with the term “innovation” many years ago.  The public thought the word meant make a new thing, do science” but there was such a thing as a financial innovation which simply meant “make more money” they let people think they meant the first thing when they actually meant the second.  “Obstructing ability to innovate” takes on a whole different meaning then.

[Toxiclegend]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

eBay has a "no item" policy. Selling "air guitars", "bag/jar of air", "ghost in a jar", and similar unprovable things is a one-way street to banville.

 

As long as there is physically something there, and it's not misrepresented, it's fine. At worst these will get keyword spam taken down if they're in the computer category.

Now they do because of the air guitar thing this was back in like 2003-2005 if I remember correctly.

To start with they didn't sell for a lot maybe £10 or something but then people started to pay hundreds for certain "models"

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Off Topic

@Mykull

• While this might be news, it's not suitable for Tech News as it's first party (you are the one reporting from eBay listings).
• If you can find news articles discussing about this, it can be moved back.
• The only relation to tech is item in question, otherwise this particular scam is old, and something discussed even in WAN Shows in past.

[LogicalDrm]

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Also cleaned and locked. This is going around in circles.

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