Recently, ResetEra user jokkir posted that he purchased a Switch 2 game at a discounted price in the Amazon warehouse - "Consciousness Existence". Amazon Warehouse is a channel on the platform that specializes in selling second-hand, open-box, returned, refurbished, or slightly damaged goods in packaging, often at lower prices than brand new items.
jokkir has purchased games from Amazon's warehouse many times before without encountering any problems, so he didn't have too many worries this time. However, when he inserted the game cartridge he received into Switch2, not only did nothing happen, the cartridge was also stuck in the card slot and could not be removed. Eventually he had to force it out.
Unfortunately, forcibly removing this "foreign object" appears to have damaged the Switch 2 console. jokkir said that after this incident, his Switch2 could no longer read other game cartridges, and speculated that some pins may have been damaged. The source of the problem was quickly revealed: this so-called game cartridge did not have any electronic components inside, it was just an empty shell.
From the photos, you can clearly see many flaws: the color of the cassette shell is slightly off, the back lacks the proper markings, the label is not in the correct position, the metal contacts are not visible in the groove on the back, and the lower right corner lacks the proper notch. The overall appearance is more like a red Switch1 cassette than a Switch2 cassette.
The community generally believes that this is a typical Amazon return package fraud: someone first purchased the genuine product, then applied for a return and refund, and sent the forged fake cassette back to the warehouse, but no abnormalities were found in the return processing process. Some netizens speculated that this fake cassette might be made by 3D printing.
Amazon warehouses have exposed similar problems many times before. In December last year, a consumer purchased a Corsair DDR5 memory set, but actually received DDR4 memory disguised as DDR5. Earlier, an RTX4090 graphics card that was sent to a repair shop even had laser etching on its VRAM and GPU core, making it almost fake.