An 11-year-old Florida boy has uncovered a loophole in Newegg’s mobile app that allowed him to buy an Nvidia RTX 3000 graphics card in seconds.
I tried out the loophole today and—amazingly—it works. The bypass let me purchase a $729 Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics card without going through Newegg’s lottery system to land a GPU.
Nor did I need to buy the graphics card as part of a bundle. Newegg charged my credit card for the RTX 3070 card as a standalone purchase. According to the retailer, my order is slated to ship out later today.
I learned of the loophole from Ricardo Santana, who lives in Orlando, Florida. His son, who goes by the same name, stumbled on the bypass in his desperate search to buy a new graphics card amid the great chip shortage.
For several months, the duo had experienced no luck obtaining a GPU from the retailer’s lottery system, the Newegg Shuffle, which doles out a limited number of PC graphics cards each day. In April, Newegg said on average that 100,000 people participate in the lotteries. Hence your chances of scoring a card from the system are low.
But last week, the 11-year-old boy discovered a way to bypass the entire lottery system. “I was very surprised when he came over and the graphics card was in his (Newegg) cart,” the elder Ricardo Santana said. “I was like ‘check out, check out, check out, check out, check out,’ and then everything went smoothly.”
Three business days later, they received the GPU, an EVGA RTX 3090, which is currently listed as out of stock on Newegg. “He’s currently playing on it now,” Santana said of his son.
How the Loophole Works
It involves the retailer’s custom PC builder service, through which Newegg has started selling a limited number of RTX 3000 graphics cards. These products have been dubbed “hot items,” but the GPUs can only be bought as a bundle with other PC parts, including the CPU, RAM, motherboard, power supply, and case. You also have to pay Newegg to assemble the parts into a working desktop for you.
However, Santana’s son discovered that Newegg’s mobile app can let you buy the hot item GPUs from the custom PC builder service individually. Go to PC builder > Build your PC > Video Cards section. You’ll see various RTX 3000 GPUs listed as out of stock. But in some cases, if you add the product to your cart, the app will do so, and let you purchase it.
The video below demonstrates this workaround in action. As you can see, Newegg even allowed me to add more than one RTX 3000 GPU to my cart, and check them all out if I wanted to.
The elder Santana reached out to PCMag about the loophole after reading about my experience camping out at a Best Buy to buy a GPU earlier this week. By using this loophole, I could bypass the painful wait entirely.
“I thought about purchasing more, but don’t want to abuse it, and would like to give other people the opportunity,” he said. “I’m thinking that they (Newegg) are prioritizing selling custom builds with the inventory they have for the Shuffle. I’m not sure exactly how many people are winning the Shuffle but I tried the Shuffle so many times and never won.
“It’s terrible that we have to go to this extent to be able to obtain these cards,” he added.
The loophole, on the other hand, can make buying a PC graphics card from Newegg easier than ever. We’ve reached out to the retailer, and we’ll update the story if we hear back. But expect the bypass to get patched soon.
