Man pays $1125 for NVIDIA high end graphics card. But senses something is off, demands to open package at pickup store: ‘His intuition that day’

A savvy consumer’s suspicions have paid off after he bought an expensive graphics card and insisted on opening it at the retailer’s pick-up point. There was supposed to be an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti inside, but what he found was just… a bottle of water.

As reported by Tech SK, the incident took place in Russia, with this high-end graphics card retailing for about $1,125 domestically. With a purchase that valuable, the buyer was clearly on edge and didn’t want anything to go wrong.

As per the report, he arrived with a friend and insisted that he unbox the card with store employees watching and while his friend recorded it on video. Images purporting to be from the incident show what appears to be a factory-sealed box wrapped in plastic, with no outward indication that anything was awry.

“He doesn’t even seem that surprised”

It appears that the customer may have had a good reason to be paranoid. Reports from Tech SK indicate that there was a recent drama involving the same retailer, in which a graphics card purchaser found nutritional supplements inside the box. This allegedly began a months-long saga where that buyer struggled to get either a replacement card or their money back.

This kind of situation is, sadly, commonplace with high-end items around the world. There was a notable cluster of incidents when the PlayStation 5 launched, with some of those who bought systems online receiving boxes containing (variously) air fryers, Nerf guns, bags of rice, George Foreman grills, cat food, foot massagers, bedsheets, toilet roll, or just air.

A significant portion of these orders were via Amazon, and the company acknowledged the issue and assisted with replacements and refunds. Despite widespread suspicions that delivery drivers and warehouse staff were to blame, there have been no criminal convictions.

To avoid theft like this, Amazon News advises that, if possible, you be at the door waiting for your delivery driver, you use a package pick-up location, and you use home security devices like Ring cameras to monitor anyone delivering packages. If the worst happens, then they urge customers to report thefts to both Amazon and the local police.

It’s unclear what the resolution was in the case of the man and his graphics card, though with multiple witnesses and video footage of him opening the apparently factory-sealed box, we can only hope he either received a refund or his graphics card.