In a quiet heist gone wrong, 20 Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics cards have been stolen from a Russian warehouse, allegedly by its employees.
Worth around $38,000, the graphics cards were successfully stolen, but there is no happy ending for the alleged thieves.
Buying a graphics card is difficult everywhere, but soon it will be even more difficult in Russia. Due to the various sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, many companies have ceased doing business in the country, AMD and Nvidia included. As a result, once the current supplies of graphics cards already available in Russia run out, buying a new GPU will likely only be possible through resellers and scalpers.
Employees of a Russian company called Wildberries apparentlydecided to take advantage of the scarce supply and high demand by stealing the graphics cards that were readily available to them in the warehouse they worked at. Three or more employees were involved in this scheme, and 20 RTX 3070 Ti graphics cards were stolen in the process.
Each of those graphics cards was worth 200,000 Russian rubles. The exact price conversion is tricky right now due to the fluctuations in the price of rubles, but this amounts to approximately $1,900, give or take. (At the time of this writing, the exact price is $1,860.) Put together, this means that around $38,000 worth of graphics cards were stolen. This is where things go south.
As the process of removing the GPUs from the warehouse went smoothly, the alleged thieves were eager to get rid of the graphics cards before anyone spotted the loss. The thieves then proceeded to sell all of the cards at a local pawnshop. The owner of the pawnshop took the deal, but felt suspicious about the fact that so many brand-new GPUs were being sold all at once, and at a pawnshop of all places.
The owner of the store contacted the authorities to make sure that the graphics cards came from a legit source. This quickly led to the alleged thieves being captured, and the graphics cards returned to the source at a Wildberries warehouse. The heist was caught on video, shared by Mash, and later re-uploaded by VideoCardz.
This isn’t the first bit of news about stolen PC hardware we’ve received in the last few days. A Chinese national was recently caught entering China with a whopping 160 Intel processors strapped to his body, including previous-generation CPUs as well as the latest Intel Alder Lake models.
