CBC News reports that Matthew Legault’s parents decided to buy him the parts he needed to build a PC as recognition of his graduating high school in June. Tom’s Hardware notes that it sounds like an impressive list of gaming hardware: an NZXT H510 case, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3600 memory, a Samsung 98 Series 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, and an MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk motherboard. Matthew also opted for an RTX 3060 Ti, a card we praised in our review. But when the $690 Zotac GeForce Twin Edge RTX 3060 Ti arrived at his Calgary home, he was shocked to find the box contained a fake card consisting of a plastic casing filled with something that looked like putty “to give it weight.” “It was actually a bit of a shock,” said Matthew. “Everything looked pretty official up to the point where I pulled it out and took a second look.” “It was absurd,” said François. “It’s just a piece of plastic so I doubt there’s any danger to their employees. And secondly … now they’ve destroyed the piece of evidence.” The situation brings to mind the person who bought an RTX 4090 from Newegg and was sent a box filled with weights instead of the $1,599 graphics card. Even Gamers Nexus had a similar issue when it returned a CPU (in an unopened package) that Newegg claimed had been damaged. So, what’s the best way to protect yourself when receiving fake items? Other than buying from local retailers, some gamers say they always video themselves opening an expensive piece of hardware as evidence of its contents. That might sound extreme, and there’s no guarantee it’ll even work, but it’s easy to see why more people are doing this.
