Remember the Redditor that claimed to have been scammed by Overclockers UK. The company simply slapped a paper trail down to suggest that 'the customer tried to defraud us.'

It is easy to rally around a gamer who is not a hardware manufacturer. There have been many public controversies involving RMA support and other issues. The natural pro-consumer and anti manufacturer attitude that may result from this can be exploited. If UK online PC hardware retailer Overclockers UK is to be believed, then this could be the case.

OCUK rebuked a Redditor earlier this year for claiming that they received an RTX3050 after sending their RTX4070 Ti in for RMA. This caused a stir online. The original Reddit post sparked sleuthing, speculation and a lot of commotion.

OCUK tells us that it has done its own investigation, saying: "After months investigating the issue, there is reason to believe that the customer was trying defraud us."

OCUK has provided us with a complete timeline of events as they see them.

In April, OCUK told us on X that they did not have an RTX3050 to defraud Redditor, and that the package that was sent weighed a lot more than the RTX4070 Ti that Redditor claimed that they had swapped.

In this new revelation, OCUK seems to have revealed three important pieces of information.

First, that "the returned GPU weight at 500 grams" with this information being "obtained from DPD at the hub when they received the item", 500 grams being much lighter than the manufacturer-confirmed 1,188 grams of the RTX 4070 Ti the customer said they sent in.

Second, "photos obtained from DPD as well as our internal CCTV show the parcel containing GPU remained in same condition since collection, passed through the DPD Hub, and arrived with me". This means that it was probably not tampered with in the delivery process.

Third, the customer had "attempted to cancel the finance agreement by contacting the finance company directly", but "the company decided to side with us after reviewing the evidence provided", "and no further communication has been received since by the customer, the police or the regulatory body".

OCUK says that it also "had call recordings" of the customer telling us about the machine in which the wrong GPU was a component. This was information that we did not know before, showing that he knew what it was and where it came from.

This particular piece of information doesn't seem to be very convincing. Reddit helped the customer figure out the origin of the 3050, so it doesn't mean that they knew the exact story.

The rest of OCUK’s investigation seems to confirm what they said when the story first broke. It says, for example, that its "internal safety procedures prevent foreign products from entering our operations areas and contaminating our stock holding." And it also confirms that the GPU sent back to them was not one we had ever stocked.

The most damning evidence, if it's true, is that the original package was less than half the weight of what the customer claimed he sent in. Even if this evidence is not enough to judge the case categorically, it shows that there was a very small window of time between the door and depot where the card could have been switched.

A rookie oversight, if you ask me. It would also be a rookie mistake to choose a PC hardware retailer who keeps track of their comings and goings.

What is the lesson for us? I suppose that we should all remember to not let pro-consumer attitudes influence objective analyses, no matter how fun it is to bash The Man or The System or whatever. There are many legitimate opportunities to do that, but it doesn't seem like this is one of them.