So, about a day ago, some guy on Reddit, re-posted this TicTok video that apparently shows a self proclaimed GPU scalper, (I mean, the person's Tictok username is actually @gpu_scalper.) Now, that could be a really bold scalper, but it sounds a bit troll-ish considering the general sentiment towards scalpers across the internet, and especially within the gaming community. Anyway, the post titled, "That’s what you fucking get…", just plays the video with no other context. The video shows what a appears to be a guy's hand picking up loose graphics cards and showing the captions while saying with a text to speech converter, "I'm beating myself up over scalping so many"... "I told myself I would sell them soon"... "But now, I'm at a $23,000 loss 📉", while the song telepatía by Kali Uchis plays in the background. gpu_scapler basically says they've done anything they possibly could to sell the graphics cards at fair prices, or even give them away, but in the end, it's just looking like it's gonna be a huge loss. What do you think? Does life test the wrong people?
Anyway, here's the original video from Tiktok
@gpu_scalper Bro this sh!t stinks. I’ve done anything I could. Giveaways, selling them at fair prices, and not being selfish. Life tests the wrong people sometimes
♬ telepatía - Kali Uchis
So, it looks pretty convincing... or at least it does to a bunch of people on Twitter, Reddit, and therefore pretty much the whole internet... Especially when you give it that sweet 'breaking news' Graphic design treatment, see look:
feel good story 🥰 pic.twitter.com/MiIYiqP2D2
— zack shutt (@zackshutt) June 1, 2022
So wait, what actually is the definition of a scalper? Well, a quick google search says that a scalper is "a person who resells shares or tickets at a large or quick profit." but of course in recent years, people have started to refer to people who basically do the same thing with highly in demand consumer products as the same thing. This trend of scalping highly sought-after electronic items has been very prevalent lately since supply can't seem to keep up with demand. You know, things like Playstation 5s... I mean, how many times have we all googled, "PS5 in stock", or "Steam Deck release date", in the last year or so? It's been pretty brutal for any consumers just wanting to buy new gear to simply enjoy as it was intended. But yeah anyway, back to the point! Nobody looking to flip items like graphics cards is gonna open them out of the box and have them just laying on top of each other getting scratched up and finger print smudged up like that. And if you go to gpu_scalpers's actual Tiktok page, you can see that most of their videos are of crypto currency mining rigs, so they've obviously been mining crypto. So yeah, still probably just as annoying to anybody who actually wanted a graphics card to just game on, but looks like this poster is actually someone who used these graphics cards to mine crypto, most likely Ethereum, cause you can't really mine Bitcoin with graphics cards anymore, that time has long passed.
But yeah, its still probably tough to sell them right now since people are flooding sites like ebay and amazon with a ton of low priced stock. Competition is really high on sites like that. One thing that this person could do to stand out from all the other people selling graphics cards on those sites would be to create their own website and market that. It might be a lot more work up front, but it would be worth it in the long run in terms of building a brand and standing out from the rest of the people on eBay. Another thing would be to try some new sites that allow you to sell used PC hardware, like this one https://chipplug.com/. Chip Plug lets you sell stuff like used gpus really easily without the hassle of dealing with a super complicated listing process. Which is nice, cause the longer it takes you to list and sell you graphics cards, the lower the prices get.
So do you think GPU prices are going to be coming down anytime soon? We'll just have to see if the MSRPs can stay stable while the rest of everything keeps on inflating. But considering that crypto prices are dropping and supply chain shortages seem to be easing up a bit, if you ever were going to sell your gpus, now might be a good time.
