Say I want a new RTX card, but I'd never in a million years be willing to pay the small fortune Nvidia is demanding due to the crypto/AI bubbles. What's the least risky way to scam one from Amazon?

Love that we can threads like this without some Redditoid carelord gaudy-slamming us with their propertarian bitchshit in the comments and melting down into a feckless ooze because of it.
- I remember how livid reddit dipshits would get over pirating movies and games and shit. Motherfuckers, everyone that actually did the work has been paid already, probably a shitty wage at that. The only people getting rich off the box office sales are the parasitic 2kg sacks of shit stuffed into a 1kg sack.
  
  Sometimes there were good reasons for that. Rampant piracy in the official r/Yuzu would put the Yuzu emulator project at risk, for example.
- I feel exactly the same. I'm so very grateful Hexbear exists as a reprieve from the incredibly reactionary English speaking internet. The one and only reliable forum where we can rest easy and know we won't be judged or insulted according to the standards of capitalist hegemony.
  The terminally boot addicted, paypig assholes of reddit are such an underrated element of why reddit's radioactive cesspit of a community is so insufferable. This thread would have been removed by mods if posted anywhere on reddit but r/illegalifeprotips (which I am absolutely stunned the reddit admins have continued to let exist despite having effectively become r/shoplifting 2.0 but with a much broader criminal subject manner).
  The icing on the cake is that these people just get more and more emboldened as reddit hemorrhages leftists and continuously lurches right. More and more often these days I've noticed that comments complaining about Nvidia's extortionate pricing tend to result in these freaks crawling out of the woodwork to literally outright mock and shame people for being too poor to afford mid-end GPUs anymore. Reddit has always been bad, but holy shit, I don't remember reactionaries being quite this mask off about these things back when r/CTH was around.
- carelord gaudy-slamming
  propertarian bitchshit
  feckless ooze
  ✍️ ✍️ ✍️ our posters are so powerful

Better to claim it showed up with copy paper or or a bag of sand in the box. Whatever it is must weigh close to the same as the video card since the shipper weighs the package while in route to you. That way if they do an investigation the box will weigh the same as it did when it was scanned and they'll have no idea where the video card could have been stolen.
Make sure to order it on a credit card. If Amazon won't refund you, contest the charges and the credit card company will refund you.
If they ask for a police report, don't worry. Call the non emergency line and tell them you need the report to get a refund from Amazon. They're likely to take the report over the phone(some bigger departments even will do them via email). They will do no investigation as long as you tell them you got an empty box.
- After thinking it over for a little while, this seems like the way to do it. The weights should be inside the RTX box itself in place of the card, right?
  
  I mean, that way even if they took a picture of the box they sent, they couldn't prove that it wasn't actually a bag of rocks the whole time inside.

if you buy something that lets you return it to kohl's as an option you could always do that and if there's a problem claim the Kohl's people fucked it up
kohl's policy 2 years ago was to just scan the code, print the lable, chuck your crap in a box or bag without question

I read an article that RTX are going up in price again because scalpers are buying them to sell them to China which can't buy them legitimately because of the US export bans lol
- Nah. The only cards affected by this are high end workstation cards and the 4090. There is some scalping of very specifically only 4090s already in-country which are being purchased and repurposed into RTX 6000 Ada server cards for use in AI server farms.
  The reason that 4090s are so expensive is because a huge amount of stock was redirected to China before the ban went into effect in mid-November. Anyone in the west trying to scalp, especially on 4080 or anything lower is going to be in for a very funny 2020 toilet paper scalper
  time.
  Nvidia sent about a 6-month supply of the AD102 chips to continue making 6000 Ada and 4090 cards until the 4090D variant chips are ready, but AIB manufacturers are taking advantage of the situation and massively increasing prices of units while also focusing all manufacturing into workstation cards. They're also repurposing gaming GPUs into more expensive workstation cards, to ensure that there will be a huge amount of the 6000 Ada cards for likely years to come, and gamers are just gonna have to stick with the 4090 they have or get a 4090D which will be slightly less powerful.

usually they don't check at all
there is always the remote possibility that you will be the unlucky fucker that some jobsworth does decide to check though
- What I've heard previously is they are much more likely to check with electronics worth several hundred dollars, something about how such returns automatically get flagged to be inspected separately.
  That said, I'm wondering if maybe the GPU isn't the component I should be doing this with. Perhaps it'd be more foolproof to just swap the IHS of an i9 and Celeron of the same socket and return the Celeron wearing the i9's serial number. I've never heard any stories about Amazon literally testing parts in a test bench before.

Obligatory
user comment: but that's stealing!!

Hexbear: Yes.

Keep us posted on what works comrade!

someone on here traded in an bought used/broken graphics card that was cheap by ordering a graphics card on amazon and then putting the broken one in the box and returning it
- I remember that thread and if I was going to do this it'd be with this method. Maybe it'd be feasible to swap out the cooler or forge the little serial number sticker on the actual card?

Hey if there was a significant financial incentive to do this en masse - crypyo bros probably did it a lot during the Crypto Boom when there was hundreds of thousands of dollars (or millions) to be made from doing so - companies probably have caught on by now.
I'm not an expert but that's the vibe I get from this.

i thought they did shit to the 3000/4000 cards to make them less good for crypto or something
- They did for a bit, but now crypto mining on cards is dead anyway. The high prices now are just Nvidia's greed (and a little bit foolishness, they over ordered iirc).
  
  and a little bit foolishness, they over ordered iirc
  Wouldn't that mean lower prices?

get something like this? https://www.ebay.com/itm/145432649565 or https://www.ebay.com/itm/134831628101 to return??
if your account has a good history theyll refund you fine.
- That's what I was thinking, but I'm unsure if good standing is enough for them to not check the serial number on a product worth over two grand. Maybe swapping something worth less than like 500 dollars would go unnoticed, but more than two grand feels like it's really pushing the limit here, especially when felony theft charges could very well be the worst case scenario.
  I'd give this a shot with a cheaper card if I could figure out how to flawlessly swap the serial number label.

I need a new GPU so great thread comrades,
Although what are the risks some random Amazon employee gets fucked over it? I certainly don't care about Jeff's profits but I wouldn't like fucking over a worker over my treats

Make sure package is left on doorstep. Oops someone stole it from doorstep. Did not receive item.
- They'll really, actually refund for this? I figured that in cases where the package is actually stolen from your doorstep that Amazon would just tell you to pound sand by saying it's your fault you didn't secure the thing soon enough.
  Will they require a police report? I'd loath to talk to the fucking cops about anything, but hey, if it saves me nearly a thousand dollars on a GPU, then maybe I should just get over it for few minutes to do so. I guess I could simply be as vague as possible in filling out the report. If the police really wanted to, they could probably get permission to look at my neighbors ring cameras, some of which probably have a view of my front door, but I guess that's a moot point because the cops aren't going to put in anywhere near that kind of effort into solving a petty theft when they could be spending their time on more productive pursuits like shooting family dogs and planting drugs on black people.
  
  If the police really wanted to, they could probably get permission to look at my neighbors ring cameras, some of which probably have a view of my front door,
  This is the thing I would worry about only because so many police departments probably have easy access to camera systems that it would probably be a good chance for them to look busy with minimal effort. Shooting dogs and planting drugs is a lot of work.

So it will be riskier if your account doesn’t have a solid history of purchases and returns. My account is shared with a bunch of people who purchase way more shit than I ever do, so it’s likely they don’t care if I skim a few hundred dollars every now and then because the other purchases offset it. L
I can be speaking out my ass, of course.
Anyway, often times I would go to customer support chat and just say that a product isn’t working and I’d like to make a return. However, you also gotta sound very busy and a little irritated about having to return your stuff because Amazon “failed” to meet its obligations. If you’re convincing enough or the employee doesn't care, they’ll refund you without making you return anything.
There are three ways to go about this:
The package was stolen: you tell support that you didn’t get home until late at night due to work and the package is missing.
The product damaged my device: the graphics card overheated and your computer started smoking. The card is damaged and so is your computer, and you’re very upset. You don’t feel comfortable taking apart components because they’re still smoking and could electrocute you or cause fires.
Bait and switch: Order some no name graphics card on alibaba or whatnot. Tell Amazon support that despite it being labeled new, the package arrived opened and inside was a random graphics card that isn’t NVIDIA. Tell them you do not trust Amazon to deliver genuine products and you want a refund. They will likely make you return the package. This will leave a paper trail of you purchasing the other card, but it’s unlikely they’ll check unless it’s like $1500. However, if you look hard enough you may find a bootleg of the actual card which means it’ll look mostly similar to the original.

Honestly, just get a used 3090 on Ebay. The mid and lower tier Ada (40-series) cards are just bad on their own merits. Ampere (30-series) is still fine, and buying secondhand means you aren't giving Nvidia money.
If the issue is also affordability, get a used 3060, preferably the 12GB one. Still has respectable performance and is good for its price point, better than any Ada cards on value.

- That one might fuck over an actual person selling a card they no longer want or need. Have to be careful to pick an enterprise seller.