Buying a Used GTX 1080 Ti – Is It a Scam?

[Andriy Andrusyk]

I am buying a used MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. All photos are attached. Is it a scam?

[momaka]

Hard to say without seeing the board in person.
But given your other thread where you got a RX480 (or was it a 580) instead of a GTX 1080 and that both were from MSI, I think there is a small chance that it could be.
In particular, I can't remember if this was with MSI video cards from that era/age (I think it was)... but I remember there was one OEM where you could swap the back plates between the GTX1070 and 1080 without actually damaging or touching any of the warranty stickers, and the actual model of the card was stickered to the backplate rather than the card itself. At the time, I was working at a large computer store in the US, and when one of the returns kiosk employees asked me to verify if a card we got back really was a GTX1080, I found out that it was not. Turns out, there was a local guy who would buy both GTX 1070 and 1080 cards from the store, swap the backplates of the two, then return the 1070's (now with the 1080 backplates) and claim that the 1070's were good enough for his "needs", so that's why he was returning the "1080's". I don't know if he ended up getting caught and brought to court or simply banned from the store. But in any case, this was a real scam back then, and now that you mention this here, I think it was with MSI video cards.

See if the backplate on such a card can be removed without touching the warranty stickers. If it can, then MSI was indeed the one where it was possible to do this.

[momaka]

Hard to say without seeing the board in person.
But given your other thread where you got a RX480 (or was it a 580) instead of a GTX 1080 and that both were from MSI, I think there is a small chance that it could be.
In particular, I can't remember if this was with MSI video cards from that era/age (I think it was)... but I remember there was one OEM where you could swap the back plates between the GTX1070 and 1080 without actually damaging or touching any of the warranty stickers, and the actual model of the card was stickered to the backplate rather than the card itself. At the time, I was working at a large computer store in the US, and when one of the returns kiosk employees asked me to verify if a card we got back really was a GTX1080, I found out that it was not. Turns out, there was a local guy who would buy both GTX 1070 and 1080 cards from the store, swap the backplates of the two, then return the 1070's (now with the 1080 backplates) and claim that the 1070's were good enough for his "needs", so that's why he was returning the "1080's". I don't know if he ended up getting caught and brought to court or simply banned from the store. But in any case, this was a real scam back then, and now that you mention this here, I think it was with MSI video cards.

See if the backplate on such a card can be removed without touching the warranty stickers. If it can, then MSI was indeed the one where it was possible to do this.

[Andriy Andrusyk]

@monaka

Thank you for the response! It turned out to be another scam. The configuration of the radiator tubes matches that of the Radeon RX 480, whereas a genuine GTX 1080 Ti has a different tube layout.