Newegg GPU purchase loophole discovered, quickly patched

You won't be able to replicate the trick, though.

What you need to know

• Graphics cards are in extremely short supply worldwide.
• One 11-year-old boy figured out a way to score GPUs with ease from Newegg.
• The trick has since been made obsolete by Newegg.

In the event you've been on Newegg lately, you know the amount of struggle required to get one of the best graphics cards. Be it a top-tier AMD card or an NVIDIA GPU such as the RTX 3060 Ti, you're going to have to go through a lot of headaches to get the product you're after. But what if the shortages disappeared and you could buy what you wanted when you wanted?

That became the case for an 11-year-old boy recently. As reported by PCMag, the clever kid discovered that by using Newegg's app, he could buy a "hot item" from Newegg's PC builder service à la carte.

The trick went like this: Even if an item showed up as out of stock, when you tried to add it to your cart, there was a chance it would work on the app, allowing you to buy the product as though you'd grabbed it from a regular in-stock store listing.

This lends credence to the theory that Newegg is holding rare GPUs for its PC assembly service and associated operations.

PCMag tested the loophole firsthand and confirmed it to be possible as of the time of its report. However, shortly thereafter, the app-based trick was patched up, and now Newegg is back to its regularly scheduled drip-feeding of GPUs via its raffling events. With that in mind, if you like scouting for holes in website infrastructure, know that they're out there and ready to help you get GPUs. A boy found one and earned an EVGA RTX 3090 for his troubles.