After Nvidia released its highly-hyped GeForce RTX 5090 cards, stockists began selling out really quickly. While we hope that at least some of those cards got into the hands of people who will put them to good use, there are some that ended up in the clutches of scalpers. Now, the price of an RTX 5090 has shot up to $9,000 on the second-hand market, and some people are fighting back against the scalpers with fake product listings.

People are trying to catch scalper bots off-guard with fake products

As reported by IGN, the price for an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 has soared over four times its RRP. This, in turn, has sparked some people into trying to bait scalper bots into buying their products despite them not having a card to sell.

Of course, eBay scams are by no means new, and it's easy to assume that these people baiting bots are also trying to trick humans into entering a bad deal. However, from what we've seen, the posters have done everything they can to inform people that the listing is not for an actual card and is instead for a photograph.

Here's an example: a sold listing for a fake GPU was titled "Geforce RTX 5090 (read description) Picture Only - Not the Actual Item." The description reads as such:

Please read carefully before purchasing. This listing is for a picture only of the item shown. You will receive a printed photograph of the item, not the actual item itself. By purchasing this listing, you acknowledge that you are buying a picture and not the physical item. No refunds will be given for misunderstandings regarding this description. Thank you for your understanding. Happy buying! ☺️

It's clear the seller set up their product so that it'd catch a bot scraping eBay for products to purchase and resell while also warning humans about the trap. We can only hope that someone didn't impulse-buy without reading everything.

Another listing, which IGN reports was active but has since been removed, used the following as its description:

Bots and scalpers welcome, do not buy if you are a human, you will be getting a framed photo of the 5090, you will not receive the 5090. The photo detentions [sic] is 8 inches by 8 inches, I got the frame from Target. DO NOT BUY IF YOU’RE A HUMAN.

If there's anything to learn from this, it's to take care if you're planning to score a card off of eBay, or else you'll bite some bait set for a scalper bot. Or, you can play it safe and wait for more stock to come in; after all, there are some good reasons not to grab an RTX 5090 just yet.