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German scammer sells hollow RTX 5090 GPUs to two buyers

By PulseAugur Editorial · [1 sources] ·

A scammer in Germany has defrauded two individuals out of thousands of dollars by selling them hollowed-out Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics cards. These cards, which lack essential internal components like silicon and memory chips, were sold for significantly less than their market value. The scammer used tactics such as providing fake invoices and altering serial numbers to deceive the buyers, highlighting a growing trend of sophisticated scams targeting high-demand hardware. AI

IMPACT This incident highlights the risks associated with purchasing high-demand hardware on the secondary market, a trend exacerbated by the ongoing AI gold rush.

RANK_REASON This is a scam involving a product, not a product release or significant industry event.

Read on Tom's Hardware →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

German scammer sells hollow RTX 5090 GPUs to two buyers

How we ranked this

Signal score
0 / 100
Composite score across the factors below. Higher = stronger signal that this story matters right now.
Newsworthiness bucket
Tool
This is a scam involving a product, not a product release or significant industry event.
Source corroboration
Single-source cluster
Only one publisher covered this so far. Single-source stories can still rank when the publisher is high-authority, but they lack cross-source corroboration.
Topics
product, other
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AI-industry relevance
Low
Off-topic or adjacent — cluster remains reachable but doesn't surface in AI-industry rankings.
Story freshness
19 days old
Aged out of breaking-news scoring windows; ranking reflects the durable signal from the full source set.

Full methodology in our editorial standards.

COVERAGE [1]

  1. Tom's Hardware TIER_1 English(EN) · Zhiye Liu ·

    German scammer dupes two different buyers into spending thousands on hollow RTX 5090 GPUs — stripped-out cards netted fraudster $5,000 despite being worthless

    Graphics card scams without the core and memory chips are spreading worldwide, with the latest report coming from Germany.

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