The NVIDIA RTX 5080, the brand’s second most powerful consumer GPU, and definitely cheaper than the RTX 5090. For two thieves in China, they could’ve made a successful heist, were it not for a meddling power outage. We think it’s safe to say that in China, there is, for lack of a better way of putting it, a growing trend for thieves looking to rob Esport hotels of their precious and very expensive PC components.

The MO of the two thieves were simple: scout out which Esport hotel had high-end PCs equipped with NVIDIA RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 GPUs, swipe them, and then get the frak out of there before hotel staff got wise. We say swipe, but in this case, these thieves actually swapped out the precious Blackwell GPUs with older RTX 3060 GPUs.

The reason for this is simple: by replacing the GPU, the hotels being robbed wouldn’t realise that the more powerful RTX 5080 and 5070 cards were gone, because the RTX 3060 cards still worked. It worked in favour of the thieves; at most, the systems detected the changed GPU and would perform a GPU driver reload or restart before getting back into working order.

The GPU thieves had clearly gotten cocky and would’ve gotten away with their latest attempt, were it not for luck being on the side of their latest target. The incident took place in July, when a power outage occurred, supposedly brought on by their tampering with the PCs in the room they were in. One of the suspects had called the front desk, asking to be moved to another room after the one they were in lost power. Electricians who attended the affected room after the “guests” were moved out noticed that the desktop PCs in the room had some pry marks. This eventually led to the electrians notifying the hotel staff of the situation and prompting them to inspect another room used by the thieves.

At this point, the jig was up for the thieves after hotel staff discovered the RTX 5080 GPUs missing, having been swapped out by RTX 3060s. Again, the two men only got caught because of the isolated blackout they triggered. Had they not done so, they would’ve sold the GPUs for half their market value. For context, an RTX 5080 retails for RM8,000 per card on average. And remember, this wasn’t their first hit: previous targets had already netted them close to RM50,000, which were guessing is after you substract the cost of the lower-tier RTX 3060 that they swapped their ill-gotten gains with.

(Source: Wuhan Police via Videocardz)

Updated 6:19 pm, Mon, 17 August 26