They Stole a Graphics Card Worth 7 Thousand Dollars from an Internet Cafe!
With their ever-increasing prices and rarity, graphics cards are becoming the hardware equivalent of gold. Today, an interesting incident took place in China and some thieves decided to take advantage of the current market by stealing a bunch of graphics cards from an unsuspecting internet cafe and made off with graphics cards worth approximately $ 8,000.
Chinese news outlet 浙样红TV (via Tom’s Hardware) reported that six unspecified high-end graphics cards were stolen in the heist. The cafe owner told police they were worth about 7,000 yuan ($1,094) each, but judging by the site’s video, he put the total loss at 50,000 yuan ($7,812), presumably because the motherboards were also stolen.
A planned graphics card robbery!
The robbery was not a simple hit-and-run in the middle of the night. One of the criminals first contacted the owner of the cafe to rent the building using a fake ID. The perpetrator was also wearing a face mask due to the pandemic, meaning the owner could not verify that it was the same person on his ID card – yes, he could have asked him to remove his mask for a while.
Claiming that a friend had come to play games, the thief asked the owner for a garbage bag to leave the room, at which point the cards and motherboards were seized. Disconnecting and removing seven motherboards with graphics cards installed in the time it takes to pack a bag is honestly pretty impressive.
The chip shortage, crypto miners and skimmers have left the market in an even worse state than when Bitcoin saw its first surge in late 2017. BTC hit a then-record high of $20,000, causing massive demands from miners, resulting in something we are all familiar with: graphics card shortages and hugely inflated prices. The current issues have resulted in chaotic scenes like this at retail outlets when stocks arrive. Consumers hope the crisis will end soon, but normalcy may not return until 2023.