For quite many years now there has been a sort of half-scamming people on ebay and other similar auction websites that has gone largely unnoticed, merely getting just some passing mentions sometimes, but which otherwise hasn't been paid much attention to.
The scam is not so much a direct lie about the product being sold or auctioned, but it's often very misleading to the point that many people buy or auction on it without realizing that what's being sold isn't actually what they think it is.
And that is: Selling or auctioning the box of a product, such as a console, graphics card, video game, or similar highly sought out product. In other words, just the empty box itself, not the product that was originally inside it.
At this point this is, rather naturally, being done with boxes of RTX 30 series graphics cards, PlayStation 5 consoles, and many modern CPUs. But the practice goes many years back.
The listings for these can be confusing. The fact that what's being sold is just the empty box may be told in the description of the listing, but it might be done in such a subtle way that it's easy to miss, especially for people who are eager to get their hands on the actual product.
And especially on auction sites like ebay there isn't necessarily any sort of price being asked for the box, so there's no warning sign of a seemingly expensive highly-sought product being "sold" at a suspiciously low price. Auction sites do not require a minimum asking price, and thus there may not be such a price anywhere to be seen, and thus there's no raising of suspicion when someone is seemingly selling eg. a PS5 at a ridiculously low price (like eg. 10 dollars).
What ends sometimes happening is that a few people do not notice the (often subtle) description that this is just the empty box, not the product itself, and will auction a large price for it, thinking that they are betting for the actual product.
The person who put the box on auction usually has plausible deniability: "It's not in any way illegal to sell just the box, and I quite clearly stated, even in the title of the item itself, that this is just the box, not the product itself." The fact that the statement of it being an empty box is often so subtle as to confuse people can be hard to prove to have been done intentionally.
(On a side note, it's actually not an absolutely idiotic thing to sell boxes of products eg. on ebay. There is some legitimate demand for them sometimes. The demand might not be extraordinarily high, but there still may well be. Some people like to collect such boxes, and other people might want to replace a damaged box for a mint one, eg. to be able to better resell the product later, or for any other reason. Thus it's even more difficult to prove such an auction to have been done with fraudulent intent.)
(And on another note, sites like ebay have a warranty guarantee that in such cases the buyer can get a refund, if it's evident that the purchase was done by mistake because of being misled. However, some other smaller auction sites might have no such guarantees.)
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