WTF?! Thanks to the rising price of pretty much everything with a chip in it, graphics cards are becoming an increasingly appealing target for thieves. Two criminals in China thought they could get away with stealing RTX 5080 GPUs from an esports hotel by replacing them with RTX 3060s, but their plan was foiled by a power cut.
In China, esports hotels are essentially a cross between a regular hotel and a high-end gaming café. Guest rooms are equipped with powerful gaming PCs, often with several setups in one room so groups of friends can play together overnight.
Despite the name, they are not primarily aimed at professional esports players; they are popular with ordinary gamers looking for a private LAN-party-style experience with beds and hotel facilities included.
Knowing that the hotels had expensive hardware in their rooms, the two men booked into facilities advertised as having high-end systems with powerful cards, such as the RTX 5070 and RTX 5080.
The men's modus operandi was to replace the cards with much cheaper models from previous generations, such as the RTX 3060. They'd sneak these older GPUs into the rooms with them, break open the cabinets to access the PCs, swap over the cards, and reinstall the drivers, reports VideoCardz.
You would imagine that most people would be able to tell the difference between something being played on an RTX 5080 and an RTX 3060. But the hotel staff never noticed because the models looked fairly similar from the outside, and no customers complained about the performance, surprisingly.
The scheme finally came to an end on July 18, when one of the men had called a hotel front desk after their room lost power and asked to be moved.
An electrician later discovered pry marks on the PC case, prompting staff to investigate. It was discovered that the GPU had been forcibly removed and replaced. Staff checked another room used by the pair, and sure enough, two RTX 5080 cards had been replaced with RTX 3060 models.
Police later said that the stolen cards were sold for around half their market value. Investigators linked the pair to four similar cases across Wuhan involving nearly 80,000 yuan (about $12,000) worth of stolen hardware. Two stolen high-end GPUs were discovered when the men were arrested.
