Amazon 'mistake': Customer finds brick instead of graphics card in package

Buying electronics from official sellers seems like the best way to avoid scams, but it's not always a guarantee. A certain player found this out when he wanted to upgrade his computer with a new graphics card. The RTX 5080 was ordered and delivered, but upon opening the box, it turned out that there was a brick inside.

A brick instead of RTX 5080 from the official seller

On the subreddit r/pcmasterrace, GlassHistorical5303 showed what he got. There's no GeForce from NVIDIA in the picture; the player got a plain brick instead, but at least it's wrapped in protective foil. What's worse, GlassHistorical5303 wrote that he bought the equipment from the official PNY store on Amazon, and the giant was responsible for the delivery.

Source: u/GlassHistorical5303; Reddit

Despite that, he still fell victim to a scam and decided to appeal, which should result in an exchange for the correct product (although you can never be sure of that). Amazon usually listens to customer requests, like in the case of a player who complained about a delivery of Switch 2 and got a discount on the console instead. In the case of GlassHistorical5303, the graphics card didn't even arrive at the destination.

Guilty Amazon sales system

As revealed by one of the commentators, iamacup, the issue is Amazon's internal system, which theoretically should speed up deliveries and save space in warehouses. It's called "commingling" and it means that no matter which store on Amazon we buy a product from, the company sends out items with the same barcode, so they take them from the same shelf in the warehouse.

Sellers have been complaining about this system for several years, and, for example, Johnson & Johnson temporarily withdrew from Amazon in 2013 due to "commingling." The problem is that it's easy to fall for scams because there are fakes and expired products next to the original ones. GlassHistorical5303 fell victim to this because there was probably a brick in the box instead of the RTX 5080 among the real copies that PNY wanted to sell through Amazon.

Luckily, in mid-September this year, Amazon announced that it will stop "commingling" by 2025, which should reduce the number of accidental scams when buying from the official store.

• gaming
• scams