Hacker News Reader

Comment by cillian64 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a nasty move from EVGA to shift the downside onto whoever ends up unknowingly buying these cards on eBay. It’s weird, they normally seem like a company with a decent customer focus, and it’s not like this move is going to make any difference to their loss from the shipment, it just screws customers.

View on HN

Honestly I disagree with this. They are refusing to honour warranty claims on the stolen cards, which given the situation is totally fair.

The alternative for them is exacerbating the financial losses caused by the theft by offering free repairs/replacements on a product that they already haven’t generated any revenue on.

How could a customer tell before buying from EBay though? No sellers going to let you try to register the serial so the end customer would get screwed.

That's the risk you take buying things from randos on EBay. Buy from authorized resellers if you don't want this to happen.

You literally can't buy cards from most authorized resellers ATM and Evga is aware of that fact.

That makes it _more_ rather than less risky to buy from random people on eBay because they know that you're desperate, allowing them to charge more and figure someone will buy without doing too much diligence about the seller.

Think about how people have received defective parts, or even things reflashed to list a different model. When the market is tight like this, those abuses become that much more tempting.

So what you're saying is that buying from rando scalpers has increased risk & negative side effects? Cool. Then stop buying from scalpers.

Yes, that's the point — this thread was in response to someone acting like it's unfair for a company to decline warranty coverage for a stolen product. That seems perfectly reasonable to me: anyone buying stuff on a site like eBay needs to factor authenticity into their buying decisions.

(Here I'm reminded of a certain office manager in the 90s who “saved” a fortune on Microsoft licenses until it turned out that the floppies they got from some guy at a swap market had a virus & the resulting downtime cost them more than the savings.)

It is unfair though - a warranty covers a product being free from defects in materials and workmanship. The product being stolen happened _after_ it's manufacture, which is the thing that is actually being guaranteed.

What would be fair is a company refusing to repair/replace a counterfeit product, but (presumably, given the response) the stolen cards are genuine articles. Articles that people will inevitably purchase at around 150-300% MSRP in the current market. This is just EVGA leaving ardent supporters of the brand, enthusiasts willing to pay many multiples of what the product is worth, out to dry.

This concern should be purely between EVGA, the courier, their respective insurance agents, and local law enforcement. I'm honestly amazed it's even being mentioned by the company on a public forum.

You’re leaving out some key factors to think about: they aren’t going to take responsibility for problems caused by mistreatment while the thieves are moving it around (heat or vibration can take time to manifest), or the possibility of something being modified before the buyer gets it. A common scam in many industries is someone taking legitimate packaging and using it to sell counterfeit or returned/failed products at full price.

This is EVGA saying they don’t want their reputation and finances on the line for any of those things which can happen outside of their control, which seems reasonable.

More importantly, they’re also sending a message to potential thieves that this is not a good thing to repeat. Publicly warning buyers and preventing those cards from being treated as equally valuable as the legitimate ones threatens the profitability of stealing them. Given the high prices in the market currently, that seems like a good message.

Actually you can. EVGA has a step-up program that allows you to buy just about any EVGA graphics card, register it, and pick the new better card you want when it's available. I bought a 2070 about a year ago and just got an email today that my 3080 is in the mail. I had to jump through a few hoops, but nothing onerous. And I had to pay the difference in price, but it was the only way I could come up with to get a registered high-end card. As far as I know EVGA is the only company that offers this, and it's the reason I went with them instead of another.

No it isn’t. You but it, find it’s not covered, ask for a refund.

You ask for a refund, you get ghosted and/or seller has some form of extra plausible deniability (how was I supposed to know it was stolen either?)

Usually warranties aren’t offered for third party sellers or unauthorized sellers. I’d say someone selling stolen goods is pretty unauthorized to me.

Isn't that what eBay buyer protection is for? The difference between this and shipping a crate of rocks is that this is easier to prove.

Serial numbers should come in two parts! A public portion and a private portion.

You can use the public portion to confirm the GPU isn’t stolen, look up its warranty policy, etc. The extra private portion is need to actually register and claim ownership.

You don't need to register it. You can just do a warranty check. Asking for a serial number is probably a good idea at this point, considering the counterfeit market.

Naive question: did EVGA actually suffer any financial losses from this? If I was shipping millions of dollars of product, I wouldn't let it out of my sight without some sort of insurance.

Not naive. I work for a logistics company and every shipment is insured. Standard amount of cargo insurance is $100k for a full truckload but that goes up for more valuable items. So the question of losses boils down to the amount of insurance on the shipment and also of course the length of time required to process a claim…it could take a long time to get the cash.

This entire post seems pretty unnecessary. Not honoring warranty for products bought from unauthorized retailers is pretty standard in the industry. People buying graphics cards from the back of someone's truck or an eBay scalper are well aware of that. And are they implying they will take legal action if you buy one of these cards? Not like they weren't insured anyways.

> Not honoring warranty for products bought from unauthorized retailers is pretty standard in the industry.

USA is a free market. Everyone is authorized all the time to sell every safe product. The term "authorized reseller" is a linguistic manipulation which benefits manufacturers at the expense of everyone else in society.

Warranty goes with the product until it is used. Companies cannot refuse to honor a warranty because they dislike the person who sold it to you.

Because eVGA did not sell the stolen cards, business laws do not apply to eVGA's dealings with holders of the cards. Therefore eVGA does not have to honor any warranty that would have applied to the cards if eVGA had sold them (to anyone).

I wrote a bit more about this in [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24426635

Many states certainly do not have free markets for new automobiles.

Yes, but that is because those states have passed laws specifically prohibiting automakers from directly selling to customers. Those laws were enacted long ago to protect auto dealers (as opposed to some sort of anti-Tesla maneuver). Such laws do not exist for most other goods.

The post isn’t intended to harm unwitting buyers. The post is sending a message to the thieves, before they try to sell the cards. Should they try anyway, educating buyers to watch out for stolen goods is a great idea that will make the cards harder to sell if it works.

Uhh - that's pretty normal. If I buy my full frame Nikon off craigslist - no warrenty comes with this.

"nasty move".

Only on HN would this even be an issue. Most places, if you don't buy from an authorized dealer - no warranty. My HVAC system was the same way. If you bought grey market / off market - no equipment warranty.

Same thing with solar warranty.

That's a very weird perspective. I bought my monitor, camera, lenses, etc all second hand, and obviously I've got warranty nontheless. Manufacturer Warranty is unaffected by resale, no matter the reseller. And if the seller is a commercial reseller, I get 12 months of Retailer Warranty on top, too. (I love in the EU).

The concept that warranty would suddenly be void due to "unauthorized" resellers or retailers is very weird.

They are tackling the demand side of what could become a very lucrative business for thieves. If people are scared away from buying “dodgy back of the van” GPUs then thieves have no incentive to steal them.

Except it's not the back of a van, it's places like eBay, just about the only places you can find cards, including that majority that are not stolen. I've read through enough reasoning here that I'm not sure what the right answer is-- from a business and customer-friendly standpoint. But I think there's more gray are involved than with items that are readily available through normal retail channels.

Then again, these stolen cards may be earmarked for crypto mining operations by organized crime, and then the issue warranties to those who knowingly use stolen goods is much less grey.

People still steal iPhones although they are essentially bricks.

I've sold two GPUs (as I've upgraded -- no mining unless Dward Fortress and RimWorld counts) in the past few months on eBay.

One shipped to an eBay freight forwarder and ultimately to a buyer in Qatar.

One shipped to an eBay freight forwarder and ultimately to a buyer in Kazakhstan.

Gamers aren't the ones paying huge markups on eBay. These aren't going to be warranty registered.

I think their goal is to reduce demand for stolen cards, thereby reducing incentive to steal them.

OTOH to do otherwise would send a message that it's open season to steal their inventory.

I think the announcement is more so that people will report the cards if they pop up somewhere.

EVGA can't sell the cards as new even if they recover them, so I suspect that EVGA will let people keep the cards if they cooperate.

The goal is to find the chain of thieves. And the best way to do that is make things more public, not less.

I think they're trying to dissuade anyone from purchasing the cards from third parties to disincentivize future theft. They're a very appealing item to steal right now... small, hard to get, expensive, no real security in the supply chain (unlike trying to steal money or gold).

Assuming customers notice this quickly after buying (e.g. by trying to register their card within some short deadline, not sure what the policies are), they should be covered by buyer protection.

Presumably the idea is someone will find one of the cards for sale and then report it leading to finding the thieves.

Pretty much every company would do something like this. No reason not to discourage people from buying.

I agree... EVGA needs to make a way possible for customers to identify which cards are stolen or not at a bare minimum.

"you can also check the serial number at the EVGA Warranty Check page to see if it is affected."

Right, that's kinda difficult to do when you don't yet have the GPU in your possession. Why don't they post a list of serials of the stolen cards? I assume every shipment contains a list of the serial#s of the devices in the respective shipment?

How do I do this before I click "buy" off amazon/newegg/ebay/etc?

You ask seller to confirm the card is not stolen. If the seller lies to you, you get a refund, eBay will side with buyer if seller lied via official communications.

If you know about the theft and specifically don’t ask, you are knowingly receive stolen property and deserve whatever penalty EVGA does.

(This leaves the question of people who just buy stuff on eBay and have no idea about this news story. It would be nice if marketplaces could show warnings next to certain classes of items, but I am not holding my breath on this)

> You ask seller to confirm the card is not stolen. If the seller lies to you

Do the platforms really expect you to ask the seller first? "Not stolen" seems to be kind of implied when buying products, like "not defective", "not smashed into small pieces", or "not actually a box of rocks".

I don’t think you have to ask the seller to confirm goods aren’t stolen to be protected under eBay’s policies. Listing stolen goods is a violation of eBay’s policies to begin with. eBay says that following their policies is one of their criteria for a seller meeting their obligations under the buyer protection.

If I were EVGA, I'd contact eBay to flag all sales of the stolen GPU models, and that providing the serial number is required for the listing to be accepted.

eBay has little incentive to comply with that though.

It's literally illegal to knowingly receive or facilitate the sale of stolen goods.

Exactly, the key word being knowingly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com