WTF?! Not for the primary time, a heist has taken place by which the goal wasn’t artwork, diamonds, or gold, however one thing simply as precious as of late: graphics playing cards. Twenty RTX 3070 Ti playing cards, to be precise, however whereas the trio of thieves did handle to flee with the GPUs, they have been later apprehended by police, and the stolen objects (nonetheless many have been left) confiscated.
Mash (by way of VideoCardz) writes that the heist was carried out by two workers working at a warehouse owned by Russia’s largest on-line retailer, Wildberries. The video, full with pounding Beastie Boys soundtrack, exhibits the 2 males wheeling unmarked cardboard bins across the facility and leaving them hidden in a stairwell; it appears they stole the products from a protected after pretending to gather an internet order.
We then see the lads eradicating Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics playing cards from the bins, taking the GPUs upstairs, and dropping them out of the window to a 3rd individual—there are conflicting experiences over whether or not additionally they labored for the corporate—who was ready beneath. He strolls off, presumably to the getaway car.
While the theft itself appeared to go off and not using a hitch, it was when the thieves tried to unload the products that their plan got here undone. They bought one of many playing cards to a pawnshop for 60,000 rubles, or round $572, however the institution proprietor was suspicious and determined to tell the police.
Authorities tracked down the lads, detained them, and confiscated the stolen playing cards, although it is unclear how most of the authentic 20 have been nonetheless left by this time. If the thieves had managed to promote all of the RTX 3070 Ti GPUs for a similar 60,000-ruble worth, it might have totaled the equal of round $11,440. Split that 3 ways, and it involves $3,813, which does not appear definitely worth the jail time.
Russia is at the moment being hit with sanctions from nations and corporations all over the world, which means that overpriced, hard-to-find graphics playing cards are going to grow to be even rarer and dearer inside its borders.
This is not the primary graphics card theft we have seen. In November, 1000’s of EVGA RTX 3000 playing cards have been stolen in a truck heist—they later turned up in Vietnam—and $7,000 value of GPUs have been solen from an web café in June.
Main picture credit score: LightField Studios by way of Shutterstock
