WTF?! Paying one-and-a-half thousand dollars for a graphics card is a big decision, but those concerns often vanish when you're enjoying blistering framerates at high resolutions. What will give you buyer's remorse, however, is opening an RTX 4090 box and finding it filled only with weights. Luckily for the person involved, seller Newegg has given them a full refund.
The strange story began a few days ago when Reddit user u/NuclearInnardsBeep posted a photo of what he claimed was inside the RTX 4090 box they ordered from Newegg: nothing but a couple of large metal blocks.
The poster also claimed that rather than responding, Newegg locked their account when they complained to the retailer, which sounds like the company assumed it was dealing with a scam. But it has now been confirmed that the account was only suspended for a few days while the investigation took place, as is Newegg's standard practice when dealing with fraud cases.
Eric Wein, head of public relations and partnerships at Newegg, told Tom's Hardware that it was "unable to determine the source of the theft" and that the customer has been fully refunded and their account reinstated.
"The package was weighed both at Newegg and by the carrier. Its weight was the same and standard in both measurements for that 4090 graphics card," Wein wrote. He confirmed this has been "the only fraud case like this" and that "Newegg considers this a resolved customer case."
The whole situation has brought a lot of heated arguments. Many commentators have raised questions over whether this was a scam, highlighting apparent discrepancies such as the lack of scuffs or compression marks on the inner box carton one would expect to see from loose metal blocks being transported unsecured. Interestingly, the Redditor also took photos of the box's damaged corners before opening it as he was going to complain to Newegg about the state of the packaging.
One has to wonder if Newegg would have reacted the same way had the incident not come soon after the Gamers Nexus debacle, which saw the company change its open-box return policy following host Steve Burke's attempts to return a motherboard. It claimed the pins were bent and there were thermal paste traces around the PCB, despite Burke never even opening the box.
Burke had offered to pay the Redditor full price for the box and weights so Gamers Nexus could investigate and "nail Newegg to the wall if they're doing this."