I rely on working as a freelance 3D artist for all of my income, making commissioned 3D character models, and renders and I have plans to move further into animation also. But as I make characters with simulated fur frequently and in large heavy project files, it demands a powerful computer for rendering, especially a powerful GPU.

I have been trying to find a graphics card upgrade for much of last year and previously all of this year since my current card, a 4070 TI is starting to struggle with some of the larger scenes I need to render and some of the production process of character models, this issue is made worse by me wanting to start animating with these models which is even more demanding. But unluckily, around the same time I started looking was when GPU prices, especially the 4090s and 5090s started to really jump and soon they went above what I was willing to pay. This led me to start looking for 4090s on the used market, which I was very sketched out at doing but felt that if I could verify well enough, it should be safe

After a while I found one that seemed trustworthy enough on a site called Kijiji for C$ 1800, I had used this site in the past and never had issues. The seller seemed nice and talked in a way that made me trust them, which I suppose in hindsight was foolish of me to fall for. When I asked for videos with my name on a piece of paper beside the gpu in a computer running benchmarks, it all looked good, I asked for another video where I could see the monitor was plugged into that gpu specifically and the video showed the serial number sticker from the ad listing, I checked the serial number with Gigabyte and the warranty came up as valid for another year, and I could see the tamper seal was still on the screw on the backplate. So I felt I had enough verification. This seller was located in Toronto, which is a distance from where I am but I happened to have a friend in the area, so I arranged to have my friend pickup for me. Checking of course that it was in the box and was the same serial number as I had seen in the videos, listing etc. They verified all that was correct, handed the seller the cash and then shipped it to me.

When it arrived, I immediately went to install it into my PC, it didn't power on, it didn't show any sign of life at all when I started my PC. I thought it might have been the cable at first but then I noticed that the sticker on top with the serial number was at a slightly different angle than it was in the listing. And worse, the tamper seal was at a different angle also, I then knew either it wasn't the card the serial number belonged to, or at the very least it had been opened before and had a fake tamper seal put on it. That was when I looked in the side at the pcb and saw a mound of thermal paste contacting nothing, no CPU, no VRAM. I then opened it to find that as I thought, basically everything of value was taken out.

As it turns out, I don't really have any recourse from the site aside from reporting the seller, nor from the police or my bank because it was a cash transaction since I'm sure if they went through all this trouble to scam me they definitely used a fake name even though the account had existed for 10 years.

I've learned a lot from this obviously. I'm never buying a used PC part like that again, unless from somebody I know personally. And hindsight is 20/20 I should've told my friend to make sure the stickers were exactly in the same position, but I didn't even consider that would be a possibility, I'm still not even sure the exact way they had it working in the video unless they stripped it after the videos were taken right before bringing it to the meetup.

I'm out C$ 2000 dollars now from the 1800 I paid for the GPU itself and the further 200 for shipping it with insurance. That was about all the money I had that I could set aside to upgrade with, it was a lot of my savings in general, so now, while I will continue work as I was doing, it will set a lot of my plans back by a lot since I was relying on getting that to be able to render larger scenes and work faster overall on more character models.

I can afford rent and all my essentials still, I'm not in imminent peril, but this does prevent me from upgrading for at least a year as it stands, which slows down my plans significantly and has just really disappointed me.

Anything helps and I will be forever grateful for any support, it will directly go towards a new GPU when I can find one, that will help my work significantly.

Even if you don't donate, Thank you for reading.