There's always an element of risk involved when you purchase something online. A fragile item may well get broken or damaged in transit, or if you're buying clothes you could end up with something that doesn't quite fit. Or, you know, you could order a high-end graphics card and instead end up with a box filled with sand.
No, it's certainly not a common occurrence, but it is something Maurício Takeda is claiming happened to him. First spotted by VideoCardz (thanks, PCGamesN), the Brazilian gamer sensed something was off when they felt the odd weight distribution of their package. That was enough for Takeda to ask his wife to record the unboxing of what he thought would be a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.
As you can see from the recording below, which Takeda shared on TikTok and has so far been watched 4.8 million times, the original contents of the GeForce box had been replaced with various containers filled with sand. A Tupperware box and a couple of jars, to be exact. To make matters worse, Takeda's attempts to get a refund from Amazon have largely been ignored. One rare response sent the proud owner of a brand new box of sand to a site detailing how he can delete his Amazon account.
Even though GPU prices are lower than they have been for two years, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Takeda was expecting still didn't come cheap. The gamer paid 14,500 BRL for the high-end graphics card, so somewhere in the region of $2600. Since Takeda's refund requests have been met with nothing but dead ends, the Brazilian will now be taking the case to small claims court and finally appears to have got Amazon's attention. 4.8 million views on TikTok and a fair bit of press coverage will do that.
While this is thankfully not something that appears to be commonplace when it comes to Nvidia products, this isn't the first time in-demand gaming hardware has been replaced with something else between the warehouse and its recipient. When the PS5 launched two years ago, some of those who were supposed to receive one but didn't reported opening their boxes to find everything from air fryers to cat food in the console's place.