Customer buys ROG Astral RTX 5080, cancels order but receives GPU and $1,850 refund anyway — Amazon tells him to keep GPU and the $1,850 refund

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Essentially a free high-end GPU.

Asus ROG Astral RTX 5080 White scored for free by lucky Redditor on Amaozn
(Image credit: u/spaceman329 on Reddit / Future)

Following a gloomy bunch of GPU shipping stories on Reddit, we return with an extraordinarily positive tale that highlights the same system that often fails customers. One lucky customer bought an Asus ROG Astral RTX 5080 White OC on Amazon and received the GPU despite cancelling their order. Amazon then told them to keep the card and the refunded money, netting the user a free GPU worth $1,850.

Free 5080 Astral in White?! From r/ASUSROG

The Redditor, u/spaceman293, posted in the r/ASUSROG subreddit, mentioning how they'd cancelled the Amazon order because Micro Center had the same GPU in stock. However, a few days later the RTX 5080 ended up showing up on their doorstep anyways. Once our diligent citizen informed Amazon of their mishap, the multi-trillion-dollar corporation generously told u/spaceman293 to just keep it.

This win serves a stark contrast to the usual accounts we see on Reddit — most recently, someone who ordered an RTX 5080 received a relabeled RTX 5060 Ti instead. Funny enough, that case and this one are both results of the same system. Amazon is a big company with operations so sprawling that it's often not worth it for the retailer to go after smaller incidents — and sometimes, those end up favoring the customer.

Delays in shipping go hand-in-hand with major vendors, so it's not strange to see a cancelled order still get delivered. By the time u/spaceman293 pulled out, there's a chance that the unit was already in the pipeline, ready to travel to its now forfeit destination. In these trying times, small victories like these are just as important to highlight as the upsetting ones.

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Hassam Nasir
Hassam Nasir
Contributing Writer
23 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Dementoss
    Lucky for the Reddit user but, throwing money away like this, will only help to put prices up for all Amazon users.
    Reply
  • ohio_buckeye
    So if you’re the user, go to Microcenter and buy the 9070xt for about $650, sell the 5080 and pocket the $1200😁
    Reply
  • Gururu
    ohio_buckeye said:
    So if you’re the user, go to Microcenter and buy the 9070xt for about $650, sell the 5080 and pocket the $1200😁
    Or sell it and pay the difference to get to a 5090. The 5090 is literally <2k now.
    Reply
  • expired56k
    Meanwhile actual seller gets a charge back and also lost inventory. Amazon doesn't lose anything, they simply pass it back to sellers, often with no arbitration. Anyhow, must be a slow day for this to be news.
    Reply
  • Assmar
    Dementoss said:
    Lucky for the Reddit user but, throwing money away like this, will only help to put prices up for all Amazon users.
    Not shopping at Amazon  is an option 🙄
    Reply
  • Assmar
    expired56k said:
    Meanwhile actual seller gets a charge back and also lost inventory. Amazon doesn't lose anything, they simply pass it back to sellers, often with no arbitration. Anyhow, must be a slow day for this to be news.
    It's almost as if amazon is an awful, monopolistic, predatory company with which no thinking individual or business owner should do business 🤔
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    The seller is likely going to ask for it back, if you don't want to send it back, charge your card again. The odds they get to keep it for free are pretty low.

    Edit: I guess they already told him to keep it. Luck person.
    Reply
  • Gururu
    JamesJones44 said:
    The seller is likely going to ask for it back, if you don't want to send it back, charge your card again. The odds they get to keep it for free are pretty low. Not to mention in some states in the US keeping it would be considered theft.
    The seller probably wrote it off. Just this week I received an item and the box was smashed up and the item was hanging out of it on my doorstep. I told Amazon I wanted to return it and they gave the seller 5 days to send a shipping sticker. Didn't happen and Amazon refunded me. I never got a chance to send it. Different scale of item but the process probably same.
    Reply
  • EHH9
    Meanwhile, they send me unwrapped glass jars of spaghetti sauce and when one breaks, they demand I return it to get the $6 back. Yeah, they wanted me to bring shards of glass to my local Whole Foods to return it. I told them I wasn't doing that, and after like 10 minutes of arguing they finally credited it back.

    This guy - gets sent a free $2k GPU and they're like, "ok whatever". Lol. Can't make this stuff up

    https://i.imgur.com/OEYqJTB.jpeg
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    Admin said:
    Amazon ended up shipping an RTX 5080 that the customer had already been refunded for. The cancelled order was received by a lucky Redditor who was told to keep the GPU worth $1,850 along with the original refund money, marking one of the more positive Amazon delivery "fails" in recent memory.

    Customer buys ROG Astral RTX 5080, cancels order but receives GPU and $1,850 refund anyway — Amazon tells him to keep GPU and the $1,850 refund: Read more
    Thank you for informing me of this little trick. I think we all would enjoy a free Nvidia GPU especially given how much Nvidia has helped to drive up the cost of computing components, utility costs, and other things over the past several years. Please delete the story and Reddit post. We don't need this knowledge spreading further.;) Although.... The one thing that prevents me from trying to exploit this little Amazon glitch is the 12VHPWR Nvidia relies upon that I don't trust.

    On a more serious note, the rare few times I've had to do a return or get a refund from Amazon they've always made the process a huge pain in the butt. I ordered a mattress that went missing years ago when people were raiding package cars on west coast trains. Amazon demanded I send the missing mattress back, but it was never delivered. I can't send back what I never received! Similar story when they sent me a Blu-Ray of a movie when I ordered a sequel last year. Amazon demanded I return the sequel even though that's not what they sent me.

    I really don't trust Amazon to ship me what I order anymore, and the quality of products they carry has been on the decline. I find myself leaning more on Microcenter, Best Buy, JCPenney, and Costco these days.
    Reply