Scalpers love sites like eBay. But it seems that eBay is becoming the new battleground between scalpers and their bots. The bargain Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 you are about to buy is not a graphics card. It is an image designed to confuse bots.

Selling pictures of products in demand is nothing new. We have already seen scammers trying to sell PS5 photos for exorbitant prices, and that is exactly what is happening here. So we need to be careful not to be scammed.

Many of these listings are put out with the intention of catching bots. The logic being that if a duffer spends thousands of dollars on a completely worthless photo, he will have no money to spend on a real GPU.

Take this listing as an example: there are currently more than five days left, and it already has 14 bids. Scrolling to the bottom of the page, one can see that this listing is actually 3090 hand-drawn images and not the card itself. Another listing, which has attracted over $1,400 in bids as of this writing, promises a high-resolution photo of the card, not the card itself.

Some of these listings warn humans that they should not bid on such things and are designed to catch bots. Such tricks are not limited to the 3090, either, as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 listing indicates. Despite the clear printed photos and other warnings from the seller, 23 bids were received, totaling over $1,000.

One of these sellers was interviewed by Tom's Guide and explained part of the situation. The seller said that he did not intend to end the auction, but rather out of personal curiosity as to how the RTX 3090 auction was being handled.

That is because hosting your own auction is the only way to see exactly who is bidding. Since these listings are coming from accounts with particularly high feedback scores, there may be other users doing the exact same thing.

In this case, there appears to be one real person involved in the bidding, whose account has a solid transaction history. Everything else appears to have been done by a bot.

Lister explained that there are two types of bots out there: the first is the obvious bot that works for scalpers, buying up as much inventory as possible. The second is the "white hat" bot, which artificially inflates prices to the point where the average person cannot afford to buy.

By doing so, the public cannot fall victim to opportunistic eBay scammers, while scalpers waste their time on bots that "win" auctions they have no intention of paying for.

Whether these listings are intended to fool bots or are offered out of personal curiosity, they are still technically scams. You don't want to go through the trouble of bidding on a photo instead of the actual GPU you were expecting. Your best option is to not bid on a fake listing in the first place.

The main thing to remember is that if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is; the RTX 3090 has an MSRP of $1,499 and is basically impossible to find. Therefore, any listing below that price is automatically suspect. Especially if it is near the end.

The second thing to remember is to check the title and description of the listing for anything that indicates it may not be the actual product. Many of the descriptions I have seen are quite frank about that fact in the description, even if the rest of the listing suggests that it is a brand new, unopened graphics card.

The title may also contain clues that this is not for legitimate people, such as claiming it is a print, image, or something of that nature. One seller called 3090 a "jpegedition" and now has no bids.

If you fall for the scam and think you have bid on a suspicious listing, cancel your bid. eBay has instructions on how to do this, so read them and do the best you can. In the unlikely event that you are unable to cancel your bid and you win the auction, do not give them any money. If you message the seller and tell them what happened, at best they will cancel the listing, at worst they will send you a nasty message. Either way, it is better than giving them your money.

The best way to avoid scams is to ignore all aftermarket sites. Doing so not only makes it harder for duffers to profit, but also eliminates the risk of getting ripped off for a month's salary by a random seller; be sure to check out our guide on where to buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, and don't miss news of legitimate restocks.