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A high end GPU for less than 50% the going rate? Of course it’s a scam! But there’s so many safeguards in place these days, how could the scammer hope to keep your money?
Discuss on the forum: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1604758-this-gpu-scam-is-almost-impossible-to-detect/
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CHAPTERS
---------------------------------------------------
0:00 Intro
1:19 TL;DR?
2:09 Why It Works
4:10 How did we get here?
4:29 Marketplaces and Drop Shipping
6:19 Tracking Numbers
9:51 I've got a theory
12:30 In Our Case...
15:06 Credits
Sell your old graphics cards, or buy used ones, from a reliable source thanks to Jawa. Check them out at https://jawa.link/LTTMar
A high end GPU for less than 50% the going rate? Of course it’s a scam! But there’s so many safeguards in place these days, how could the scammer hope to keep your money?
Discuss on the forum: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1604758-this-gpu-scam-is-almost-impossible-to-detect/
► GET OUR MERCH: https://lttstore.com
► GET EXCLUSIVE CONTENT ON FLOATPLANE: https://lmg.gg/lttfloatplane
► GET A VPN: http://www.piavpn.com/linus
► SPONSORS, AFFILIATES, AND PARTNERS: https://lmg.gg/partners
Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.
CHAPTERS
---------------------------------------------------
0:00 Intro
1:19 TL;DR?
2:09 Why It Works
4:10 How did we get here?
4:29 Marketplaces and Drop Shipping
6:19 Tracking Numbers
9:51 I've got a theory
12:30 In Our Case...
15:06 Credits
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00You guys aren't gonna believe the deal I just got 800 bucks for a brand new RTX 4090 on eBay
00:13Well, I guess it was too good to be true, but no worries eBay Amazon even Aliexpress
00:21they've got robust buyer protection schemes that make it simple to get your money back if your product doesn't show up or
00:27Isn't as advertised. So the question then is
00:31Why are these scam listings still all over these platforms if they can't possibly work?
00:37I had to find out for myself. So I hit buy it now on an obvious fake listing and well
00:43It didn't happen exactly like we just showed but we did learn a ton about how scammers are operating on these platforms
00:50and how they could
00:52still get your money and
00:54Leave you empty-handed, but it's totally avoidable without sponsor Jawa. Got four
00:59I'm not Linus. Jawa is a legit marketplace for selling and buying PC parts like GPUs
01:05Not only do they have PC experts screening listings, but they also offer refunds you receive a brick
01:09This topic originally came up on the WAN show when a viewer pointed us to this listing and asked
01:24Hey, what gives with this and then I impulsively responded with I don't know. Let's order it and find out
01:31Well, we didn't even get as far as placing our order before another helpful viewer reached out and laid out how they almost
01:38Lost their money with a similar listing as it turns out these scammers have found some ways to get valid tracking numbers
01:46without actually
01:48Shipping you anything. We'll get to the how later
01:50but what you need to know for now is they can just pick a tracking number that's going to your city and then give that
01:57to eBay or another marketplace seller to prove delivery making it much more difficult for you to file a dispute, but like
02:05That shouldn't work, right?
02:07Well, whatever the reason for it. Have you noticed how couriers give less and less information about a shipment these days?
02:15forget about a zip code
02:16You're lucky to even get an origin and destination city and because eBay can't see the specifics of the tracking number that our scammer provides
02:24them any delivery to roughly the same area and roughly the same time frame will make it seem like the seller has
02:32Done their job, so
02:33Dispute closed, but here's the problem. You still don't have your GPU or your money. So what can you do?
02:41Reaching out to the scammers a waste of time
02:44They already know it's a scam and you could try to escalate your dispute with eBay
02:48But how do you prove that you didn't get your shipment? The tracking says you did plain as day
02:54Well, okay. How about the courier then surely they can see that the tracking number has nothing to do with you and they can
03:00But that's actually a problem too because they're not supposed to give out information
03:06About shipments that seemingly have nothing to do with you
03:09And then even if you do convince the courier support representative that your story is true
03:15eBay is gonna want something tangible not just an email from a neat based chat bot
03:21so what happened with our viewer then is they ended up having to
03:24Physically go to the UPS store and convince an agent there to provide a note on
03:30UPS letterhead that stated that the tracking number that the seller provided was not associated with the buyer's address
03:38Only when that was scanned and sent to eBay was a refund finally approved. So how does the scam work?
03:45Well in a nutshell the scammer hopes that either you aren't persistent enough to go get that hard evidence
03:51Or that the courier support team is too stubborn to give it to you
03:55Now I think that many of us would be pretty persistent when it comes to recovering that amount of money
04:00But here's the thing if a scam didn't work. Nobody would be trying to pull it
04:06All right. That's the short version, but this scam didn't just pop fully formed into someone's brain. So how did we get here?
04:13Well, it's kind of a funny story because get this it didn't actually start out as a scam
04:19Rather it started as a clever way to deal with marketplace restrictions
04:23So before we get into that, let's do a quick refresher on online marketplaces and drop shipping
04:29I'm sure you've seen these little sold by notices when you shop on basically any major online retailer these days
04:35Well, just like eBay these sites are acting as marketplaces
04:39The benefit for smaller sellers is it allows them to list and sell their items on large
04:46Recognizable brand-name stores in order to reach a wider customer base
04:50the benefit for the marketplace is they get a cut of every sale without needing to do inconvenient and costly things like
04:57Maintaining inventory or in some cases even fulfilling the orders
05:01This system allows just about anyone to list their product on say bestbuy.com
05:07But hold on they're gonna need a warehouse and a logistics team, right?
05:11Nope, thanks to drop shipping services
05:14the seller can just give the marketplace a list of items and inventory that they have access to through third-party warehouses and
05:21Then they wait for someone to place an order
05:24Quickly buy it from a supplier who packages it up sticks the sellers logo on it
05:28Usually for an extra fee and then ships the product to you in these cases
05:33Neither the retail site that you used nor the seller ever even touched the product that they sold you
05:39It is nothing like buying from lttstore.com
05:42where you can check out our new labs collection and rest assured that we are involved in every step of the process from
05:48Design to ordering to warehousing to shipping to customer service
05:52Where was it? Oh, right
05:54Marketplaces in spite of this lack of control
05:58Marketplaces they still want to keep their brand respectable
06:01So they do take precautions to protect their customers like for example
06:05Holding on to the money for a couple of weeks to ensure that the order actually gets delivered or
06:11Insisting that the seller provide a tracking number for the shipment and it's that last point that brings us
06:17Finally to the tracking number piece of the puzzle see no retailer likes to send you off platform
06:22So when you want to track your order
06:25They like to pull the tracking details from the couriers API and then wrap it up in their own pretty little interface
06:31Well, that means that they need to limit their sellers to the couriers that they have integrated into their site
06:38now sellers mostly played along at first but as
06:41Marketplace fees have risen sellers have felt the need to get more creative to preserve their profitability
06:48Say for example by using discount couriers that their marketplace doesn't support
06:52Well somewhere along the line someone had the bright idea to use
06:56Discount Joe's delivery then give the marketplace a made-up string of numbers and hope that as long as the item arrives
07:04No one's gonna notice or care and that worked at least for a little while
07:08But then the marketplace is wised up and they demanded that the tracking number be valid
07:14Okay. So now our sellers need a more legit fake tracking number. How do they get it?
07:19Well a quick Google search shows how these numbers are formatted and most couriers will let you check
07:25Dozens of tracking numbers at a time on their website
07:27Hundreds if you use their API
07:28So what if we just write a bot that generates and then checks tracking numbers?
07:33Logging any that work into a database so that we can use them later
07:37But Linus you say writing that bot could take dozens of minutes if you've never heard of chat GPT
07:44well
07:44Don't worry
07:45There's an even easier way a quick search surfaced a wide selection of professional looking websites that offer a valid
07:52active tracking numbers for sale
07:54I'm not talking about the dark web here guys. This is plain old boring Internet
07:58Let me show you all I got to do is select a destination city. Let's say Surrey, Canada
08:03I can specify an approximate estimated delivery date range
08:09Shipment status in transit and I want it to come from the States. I click get tracking number and
08:16Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun
08:18Ah
08:19There it is origin Kernersville us
08:23shipped yesterday
08:25You can even pick details like the approximate weight of the package if you want to get fancy and that's it
08:30We now have the tracking number for someone else's shipment for the low low price of just 25 freedom cents now
08:37Some of these sites claim that you are trading tracking numbers
08:42While others try to imply that your actual shipment will totally be trackable with the number you're buying
08:47But in both cases that is obviously complete bullshit. These services are all about tricking marketplaces
08:55But the thing is solving this is not as simple as you'd think
08:59Because the marketplace isn't the shipper or the receiver
09:03Even if they had someone on staff whose job it was to check that everything lines up
09:08the couriers wouldn't be at Liberty to share any information about a shipment that doesn't involve them and
09:15Let's be real even if the marketplace did notice the tracking was sus what are they gonna do?
09:21They're gonna email the seller and then wait for a response a response that will almost certainly be oh, sorry about that
09:28That was a mistake. Let me get back to you with the right number
09:30Well, that's gonna buy discount Joe at least a couple more days to scooter up to your driveway with that
09:36E-girl keyboard that you so desperately need at which point everyone loses interest in the investigation
09:42But where are these fake real tracking numbers coming from do these guys hire a guy on Fiverr to whip up some of those bots
09:50We talked about well, maybe but we also came across another possibility while digging through eBay forum threads
09:57Have you ever used one of those third-party tracking apps or websites to track your shipments?
10:01You know the kind they promise to track any parcel from any courier no matter how obscure which saves you the arduous work of typing
10:08in multiple three-letter domain names
10:10Well, many of these sites are in countries with let's call them loose data protections
10:15And if you take the time to peruse their terms and privacy policies
10:19You'll find that they generally do not consider tracking numbers to be personal or private information
10:25So we've got these sites that are just slurping up active tracking numbers all day every day
10:31keeping track of where they're going and when and we combine that with the market that happens to exist for valid tracking numbers and
10:39Well, let's just say there's some synergies to leverage as they say now to be clear
10:44I don't have any hard evidence and I'm not saying that all of these tracking sites are selling data
10:49I'm just saying that I would be shocked if at least some of them weren't and if they are well up until this point
10:57It isn't that bad of a scam. It is dishonest and it completely defeats the purpose of tracking
11:04But most of the sellers that are buying these tracking numbers really are shipping your product and you really will get it eventually
11:12They're just trying to jump through marketplace hoops and ship from the most advantageous sources most of them
11:18But eventually someone realized that they could use those numbers to gain their metrics
11:23Let's say someone places an order for this here this gaming mouse after the order comes through though
11:30Their supplier goes out of stock and they can't get it
11:33well
11:34Marketplaces don't take kindly to sellers who take orders that they can't fulfill
11:39so I'm in a pickle that is until I get an idea an awful idea a
11:46wonderful awful idea I
11:48Can avoid a strike on my account if I just buy one of those tracking numbers and then just not actually ship anything
11:56Then when the tracking says delivered and the customer inevitably reaches out asking hey, where's my order?
12:02I can say oh, I'm so sorry. The courier must have messed up. Well, don't worry. I'm already processing a refund for you
12:10At that point as far as the marketplace is concerned. It's the courier that screwed up. I'm off the hook
12:15Well once that little technique spread around the dropshipping community
12:19It was probably a matter of minutes before someone thought of using it to just straight-up scam people which brings us
12:26finally to my
12:28GPU here
12:29Now I got lucky and they terminated this guy's account before he could pretend to ship my order
12:35That made it much easier for me to file a dispute and get my money back, but it should be noted
12:41I still had to manually file my dispute and you might not be so lucky
12:46So then what can you do to avoid falling victim to the scam?
12:50Well step one is to exercise restraint before you yell shut up and take my money
12:56Take a breath really look at the listing is the price too low like
13:01Unreasonably low. That's a red flag. Look at the seller. Do they have no or low feedback numbers red flag?
13:09What else are they selling?
13:10Nothing, totally unrelated knickknacks. Why are you even still looking at this? That's all the red flags you need
13:16You got to ask yourself
13:18What's more likely that someone totally ignorant got their hands on a new in box 4090 realized it was worth money
13:25signed up for a brand new eBay account and then listed it for maybe half of what it's worth or
13:32That someone knows that a cheap 4090 is gonna bring all the boys to the yard and that you should just yell
13:39That's my purse and kick him in the plums
13:42Bottom line be careful out there
13:44the 50 series launch means that there are going to be plenty of
13:48Perfectly trustworthy bros out there that are looking to upgrade and move their older cards on to new owners
13:54And I'm a huge advocate for buying secondhand hardware to save money and selling it so that somebody can be using it just
14:01Take your time find a good deal
14:04Not a too good of a deal and when you're done take some time to check out our sponsor Vessi
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15:05If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out the one we did on fake SSDs being sold on Amazon
15:11Why do people feel the need to scam each other?