It can be easy to rally behind an ordinary gamer against a hardware manufacturer. There have been plenty of public controversies surrounding RMA support issues and so on. But the natural prosumer and anti-manufacturer attitude that might come about as a result can run the risk of being taken advantage of—and if UK online PC hardware retailer Overclockers UK (OCUK) is to be believed, this might be the case here.
Earlier in the year, OCUK rebuked a Redditor's claim that they had an RTX 3050 returned to them after sending in their RTX 4070 Ti for RMA. This caused quite the stir online, with the original Reddit thread spurring sleuthing and speculation.
Well, it seems OCUK has been doing some sleuthing of its own, as the company tells us: "After months of investigating the issue, we've reason to believe the customer was trying to defraud us."
We are aware of a Reddit thread by user ‘adowad’ on the PCMR sub reddit where an inno3d 4070Ti was RMA’d and allegedly a Dell Optiplex 3050 returned to the customer. It is accused Overclockers UK have deceived the customer out of a faulty inno3d 4070Ti, which had been returned…April 9, 2024
OCUK has given us a full timeline of the events as it sees them.
Back in April, OCUK's statement on X informed us all that they would never have such an RTX 3050 in store to defraud the Redditor with, and that the package they were sent in weighed a lot less than the RTX 4070 Ti the Redditor claimed they'd swapped out.
There seems to me to be three main pieces of important information that OCUK has now relayed in this new reveal.
First, that "the returned GPU weight at 500 grams" with this information being "obtained from DPD at the hub when they received the item", 500 grams being much lighter than the manufacturer-confirmed 1,188 grams of the RTX 4070 Ti the customer said they sent in.
Second, "photos were obtained from DPD and our internal CCTV showing the parcel containing the GPU remained in the same condition from collection, as it passed through the DPD hub, and arrived with us". This means it probably wasn't tampered with during delivery.
Third, the customer "attempted to cancel their finance agreement on the product by reaching out to the finance company directly" but "the finance company sided with us after reviewing all the evidence provided", and "no further communication has been received by the customer, police or regulatory body since".
OCUK also says it "had call recordings of the customer informing us of the machine that the wrong GPU was a part of—information that we didn't know previously, showing that he was knowledgeable of what it was and its origin."
However, this particular bit of info doesn't strike me as evidence of much. That the customer knew where the 3050 might have come from doesn't necessarily mean they had first-hand knowledge of it, because Reddit was helping them figure out its origin from the start.
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The rest of OCUK's investigation seems to simply confirm what they already stated back when the story broke out. For instance, it says its "internal security procedures mean foreign products cannot enter our operations areas and cross contaminate our stock holding" and that it "confirmed the GPU which was sent back to us was not a GPU we had ever stocked or had access to in our supply chain."
The most damning piece of evidence, provided it's correct, is certainly that the original package weighed in at under half the weight of the 4070 Ti the customer claimed to be sending in. Even if we're not to categorically judge this case from this evidence alone, it does mean there was only a slim moment from door to depot when the card could've been switched.
A rookie oversight, if you ask me. Then again, picking a PC hardware-specific retailer that keeps track of its comings and goings would be a rookie error, too.
And the lesson for the rest of us? I guess just to remember not to let pro-sumer attitudes influence objective analysis, however fun it can be to bash The Man, or The System, or whatever. There are plenty of legitimate opportunities for that, but this doesn't appear to be one of them.
