GPU thieves are now a thing
Two men in China had a fairly simple plan for stealing expensive graphics cards from esports hotels. In case you have not seen our previous story about RAM thefts , the esports hotel is basically a hotel where you can rent a room with beds and gaming PCs. But not all visitors are gamers. Some individuals have different plans, like the guys who checked into rooms with GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 systems, opened the PCs and replaced the cards with cheaper models that looked similar enough from the outside.
Almost perfect crime
The swap apparently worked better than one might expect. According to Wuhan police, some hotels had no idea their GPUs were gone because the replacement RTX 3060 cards still worked. Most systems only need a GPU driver reload, sometimes a restart, to fully support the replaced GPU. One hotel manager even told police that the computers were running normally and nobody had complained. Only after opening the systems did staff discover that the original high-end cards had been replaced.
© Wuhan Police Caught only by chance
The pair might have kept this going for longer if they had not caused a power outage during another swap. On July 18, one of the suspects called the front desk after their room suddenly lost power and asked to move elsewhere. An electrician later found pry marks on the PC case, which eventually led staff to inspect another room used by the pair. Two RTX 5080 cards had been replaced with RTX 3060 models.
Police say the two suspects searched online for hotels advertising high-end gaming PCs and brought cheaper graphics cards with them. The stolen cards were then reportedly sold for around half their market value. Investigators connected the pair to four cases across Wuhan involving close to 80,000 yuan (around $12,000) worth of hardware.
© Wuhan Police Police arrested both men on July 20 and recovered two high-end graphics cards that had not yet been sold. So in the end, it was not the RTX 3060 performance that exposed the scheme. It was the power going out while somebody was apparently trying to perform a midnight GPU upgrade in reverse.
I’m not sure about you, but seeing police photos of people holding recovered GPUs was not on my bingo card.
Source: Wuhan Police
