GPU SCAMMER Alert
A friend of mine, an immigrant to the Netherlands just got scammed. Someone offered a GPU for sale and he committed to buying it. They agreed to meet and money changed hands, the guy jumped on an e-bike and ran off. It turned out that the GPU and the VRAM had been removed from the card making it worthless, leaving my friend with a 3000+ euro problem. He’s a student in the AI/Robotics field so for him this is a very large amount of money to lose.
He went to the police to file a report but it turned out that all of the data the scammer had provided was fake. My friend did have one ace up his sleeve, he had made a picture of the person that was dropping off the card. So if you come across this character: Do not do business with them. The platform this happened on was the Dutch website marktplaats, a local marketplace that is owned by Ebay. If you have any data on this scammer I’d be more than happy to forward it to my friend and to the police. The picture was taken near Zwolle train station.
Now, obviously this is very annoying for my friend, but the main reason I’m posting this is that I want to warn anybody that is shopping around for GPUs right now:
The market is crazy. There are plenty of scams, and there are people unloading stolen property. Treat any kind of deal with great care, don’t deal in cash, require to see identification and only deal with people whose house address you’ve verified. It’s a complete wild west and it will continue that way until prices normalize again, which could be a while.