The Radeon RX 7900 XTX is one of the best graphics cards on the market, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that scammers are preying on less-experienced consumers who are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars. If you’re in the market for a new Radeon RX 7000-series graphics card, pay extra attention to the seller, especially if you’re buying on Amazon.
Sapphire, one of AMD’s premium AIB partners, has been warning consumers about fake Amazon listings for the company’s custom Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards since last month. Sapphire recently issued another warning to its consumers to make sure purchases on Amazon are sold and shipped by Amazon.com. The reason for the warning? The company has recently received feedback from concerned buyers and victims about scam sellers. Sapphire has urged consumers to be careful when adding products linked from the official Sapphire Technology Store, as the scam listings may be the first one that comes up when buyers add the item to the cart. Unfortunately, Sapphire has no control over this, so it’s down to Amazon to fix the mechanism.
It’s understandable why Sapphire is uneasy with all the Amazon scams out there, as the majority of them involve the brand’s products. You don’t generally see fake listings with Biostar or ASRock Radeon graphics cards. That’s not to take a dig at other brands, but Sapphire, along with XFX, are the most popular and trusted vendors for AMD’s Radeon graphics cards.
Radeon RX 7000-series Amazon listings with laughably low prices have been around for months. For example, some Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics cards were selling for as low as $399 during Amazon Prime Day. While Amazon has put in some additional effort to remove the phony listings, they’re still popping up because the scammers just make new accounts to put up new listings. Just yesterday we saw many RDNA 3 products, including the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7600, with clearly fake prices — about half what you’d expect to pay.
The bogus listings claim nonsense like “Regularly $999.99, 57% off!” on models such as the Radeon 7900 XTX. There’s no way a retailer would slash the pricing of a current-generation graphics card by more than half. With the recent ban on GeForce RTX 4090 sales in China, there has been a rising demand for RDNA 3 graphics cards, such as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT, so there’s little chance legitimate sellers are going to cut prices so low. If anything, AMD’s Radeon RX 7000-series graphics card prices are likely to be going up, not down.
Regardless of whether you’re shopping on Amazon, Newegg, Walmart, or anywhere, it’s always best to check the seller and the sanity of pricing before pulling the trigger on expensive pieces of hardware, such as processors or graphics cards. Special occasions like Amazon Prime Day or Black Friday often bring juicy discounts. But when the price sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
