A savvy 11-year-old and his dad discovered a way around Newegg's lottery system designed to randomly select who can buy RTX 3090 graphics cards.
Thanks to a combination of so many things, with the pandemic and subsequent semiconductor shortages leading the way, certain items are pretty hard to come by right now. In the video game world, those items are new-gen consoles and graphics cards. Most notably for the latter, the new RTX 3090 graphics card.
Scalpers are another reason RTX 3090s are being snapped up as soon as they go on sale. Sites and retailers have been doing all they can to stop that, including implementing lottery systems. Potential customers enter a lottery, and those who are randomly selected are given the chance to buy a graphics card, or a console, or whatever scarce item it was they were after.
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Newegg has been using that sort of system to sell RTX 3090s. Aptly dubbed the Newegg Shuffle, customers were picked at random and allowed to buy a card if they made the cut. However, as reported by PC Gamer, one 11-year-old and his dad found a workaround, allowing them to buy an RTX 3090 without needing to enter the Newegg Shuffle at all.
Newegg's site has a Build Your PC option, allowing you to add various components, including an RTX 3090. Once added, the loophole discovered by the father-son duo allowed you to delete all other items from your cart, leaving the graphics card there all alone, ready to buy, no lottery system needed. Needless to say, upon learning about the loophole, Newegg quickly closed it.
Newegg's senior brand manager Andrew Choi claims the “vulnerability only sold a small number of graphics cards. We stopped all subsequent orders”. The young man responsible for discovering the loophole can be seen pictured with his card above, so we're assuming his order was not canceled. Speaking of the RTX 3090, the GPU made the news for a different reason last week. Players of Amazon's New World beta claimed the game was frying their graphics cards. Amazon has since confirmed those claims to be unfounded.
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