Ebay sellers practicing some shady Voodoo?

[eightbit]

While on my quest for a Voodoo2 card to make my newly acquired vintage late 90's machine complete, I was forced to turn to ebay of course. This is where I found some strange "Voodoo" happening. Almost every Voodoo2 card is being sold in the "Russian Federation", or Hungary, or Bolivia, or...well you get the idea. But not just one or two. I mean, these guys in many cases have a quantity of "more than 10" and like over 300 sold.

 

What the heck? Not only that, I have noticed pictures from legit US auctions being re-used by the sellers in the Russian Federation on many auctions. I smell something fishy...

 

In any case, after wading through what I believe to be BS auctions I did find ONE Voodoo2 card being sold by a US seller, made an offer and snatched it up.

 

Anyone know what is going on with those auctions? Are they legit? And if so, did nearly every Voodoo2 get sent to Russia at some point in time and I just missed the news?

[Tanooki]

Well back in the day I know they were behind a bit on the computer front as the cold war died off and they played catch up with the world on computer stuff, so maybe early russian entrepreneur types bought up a lot of old stock and ended up with heaps of extras more recently found in some old storage. Anything is possible, but I doubt there's some russian black market scheme to pilfer the US of 20 year old computer parts to ripoff ebay users on a niche item as such.

[CPUWIZ]

Yep, I am sure this is the same case as rare Atari games from Venezuela, dumped.

[eightbit]

Makes sense. Maybe I'll test the waters and order one from them someday soon for SLI. I guess you can always file an ebay claim if you don't get it.

[+Lathe26]

There are a large number of Diamond Monster wavetable cards from Russia as well (mid-1990 audio technology). I've bought a few from there and have had no issues.