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Prebuilt PC scams on Ebay

The Ebay marketplace is not used merely by individual people to sell their used stuff, but for a decade or two now it has been used by some companies to sell new and used products as well, probably because it's a cheaper alternative to other online shops like Amazon. You can find a lot of products, new and used, from companies, and it is a reasonable alternative.

Of course scammers are always figuring out ways to deceive people into buying crap for much more money than it's actually worth, and to bypass any consumer safety guarantees that such online marketplaces have in order to protect consumers from such scams.

One particular scam that seems to have been making the rounds on Ebay in particular is someone creating a profile and product pages that look like they belong to some actual company (rather than an individual) and then putting eg. prebuilt PCs on sale. These PCs are sold at a suspiciously cheap price taking into account their alleged hardware specifications. Most typically the PC allegedly contains a GPU that seems too good to be true for that overall price point.

For example, the listing might say that the PC comes with a quite modern CPU (eg. 8-core 10th generation Intel), a significant amount of RAM (eg. 32 GB), and a GTX 1660, which normal price on its own is somewhere in the range of 250-300€, but the total price of the entire PC is eg. 350€.

Quite usually if you look up the prices of all the individual components and sum them up, you end up with something that's significantly higher than the price of the PC in offer, like double.

So how does the scam work?

Someone buys the PC (probably someone who is slightly less knowledgeable about these things and doesn't grow too suspicious about the cheap price), and then at some point, when the PC has already been dispatched but before it arrives to the buyer, the "company" sends an email to the buyer saying that there was a mistake in the Ebay listing, perhaps caused by some technical error, and that the PC doesn't actually contain the GTX 1660, but some cheap-ass 30€ low-end Quadro card, or even no card at all (ie. just the CPU's own iGPU).

The scammers are betting on the chance that the average buyer will not go through the trouble of returning the PC that they just bought, and will simply accept it as it is.

A slight variation of the scam is not sending such an email at all, but to just surreptitiously change the listing to reflect what the PC actually contains (after having sold dozens of them, before sending them).

In this case they are hoping that when the buyers receive the PC, if they even happen to check that it contains what was promised, will go back to the listing and see that the listing is actually accurate. The scammers are hoping to, essentially, gaslight the buyers, ie. make them doubt their own memory. "Wait, was it really a GTX 1660? It says Quadro xyz now... Did I misread it somehow? Maybe I got confused by the GPU of a different listing?" The scammers are hoping that the user didn't eg. save the page, take a screenshot, or in any other way have proof that the listing was different before (which pretty much nobody will do). Obviously the purchase receipt sent by the scammers will not list the individual components, just the PC as a unit.

If they succeed in selling enough PCs like this, even if a few buyers do go through the trouble of returning them, the losses to the scammers will probably be less than the profits they got.

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