GPUs stolen in California truck heist turn up in Vietnam retailer
We are finally getting a resolution to that truck heist from back in November.
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In late 2021 aliteral truck heist over GPUs occurred in California. EVGA’s product manager Jacob Freeman confirmed at the time that a shipment of EVGA GeForce RTX 30-series cards were indeed stolen out of a truck heading from San Francisco to Southern California.
The cards were said to have a retail value between $329.99 to $1959.99 USD, so there were some fairly high end cards among that mix. When they were confirmed stolen, EVGA also warned that the serial numbers were on record, so anyone trying to register them for warranty, or potentially sale would run into problems.
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As reported byVideoCardz, it turns out some of those cards are now showing up on the other side of the world in Vietnam. A Vietnamese retailer, known for packing GPUs into mining rigs, has potentially been caught distributing some of these stolen cards.
Customers have reported after buying the cards that the serial numbers are among those flagged by EVGA, and thus couldn’t be registered for warranty claims. One person reportedly bought twoNvidia GeForce RTX 3080 TiGPUs and had the same issue with each. Customers said the cards were given a 1-month warranty with the store, as well as a decent price which is to be expected of illegally imported cards.
VideoCardz didn’t publish the retailer’s name, no doubt to avoid having more customers purchase stolen cards. However, they do say that it’s not a small local retailer, meaning we could be looking at a well known chain store which is a little troubling. It’s very likely many unwitting customers, perhaps not that knowledgeable about current PC gaming and prices have thought themselves lucky to come across a sweet GPU deal without even knowing the potential issues.
The chip shortage combined with eager crypto miners continues to make getting a new GPU feel more like a dream than reality. It’s hard to get excited for anything new when the scarcity is such a large problem. That being said, we are set to seeGPU shipments rise by 10% in 2022, so hopefully truck heists to illegal imports in Vietnam will be slightly less common.
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Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find herfictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcastright here.
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