News $340,000 worth of MSI's Nvidia RTX 3090s Stolen in China

Math Geek

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Wow.


Wouldn't the thieves be exposing themselves if they did that? Or would they just make a bunch of different accounts to circumvent it?

But then all the seller listings would be from China... plus, there's still shipping and VAT..?

i'm pretty sure they could just hit the local grey area flea market and offload them for cash pretty quick. at least that's what i would do. why bother getting internet involved when i'm sure they could be spread out to a few cities and offloaded for cash very easily. they are not only sought after in the US, but everywhere else in the world as well. though with the police involved, you'd probably have to head more than a mile away from the factory to be safe. but china is a rather large country with a billion+ people in it. i'm sure a couple hundred cards can be sold and forgotten about rather quickly. probably already done
 
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Makaveli

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Wow.


Wouldn't the thieves be exposing themselves if they did that? Or would they just make a bunch of different accounts to circumvent it?

But then all the seller listings would be from China... plus, there's still shipping and VAT..?

A smart thief would have multiple accounts created behind a VPN.

I'm sure there are plenty of people in Asia that would grab one for a discounted price if they could. Plus you don't have to use EBay that is just one option.
 
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brucek2

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Personally I would assume that if I ever stole a bunch of expensive devices, that are only useful when installed into a connected PC, and that require frequent driver updates to stay useful, that there's a decent chance the manufacturer with knowledge of unique internal component ids would find a way to locate the stolen items as soon as they appeared on the internet, or at the very least brick them. Here's hoping this turns out to be a painful mistake for the thief.
 

USAFRet

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Personally I would assume that if I ever stole a bunch of expensive devices, that are only useful when installed into a connected PC, and that require frequent driver updates to stay useful, that there's a decent chance the manufacturer with knowledge of unique internal component ids would find a way to locate the stolen items as soon as they appeared on the internet, or at the very least brick them. Here's hoping this turns out to be a painful mistake for the thief.
Miners.

These will never see "the internet". They will be the farm horsepower behind other systems that are more public.
 

nofanneeded

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Personally I would assume that if I ever stole a bunch of expensive devices, that are only useful when installed into a connected PC, and that require frequent driver updates to stay useful, that there's a decent chance the manufacturer with knowledge of unique internal component ids would find a way to locate the stolen items as soon as they appeared on the internet, or at the very least brick them. Here's hoping this turns out to be a painful mistake for the thief.

You cant . Privacy laws forbids that. and you cant brick anything remotely ... unless the bios allows it. and no one would allow it because it is dangerous for all Cards not only stolen cards.
 

USAFRet

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What Apple ? we are talking about the Police trying to find the stolen cards.
The comment was made about privacy laws forbidding a manufacturer from bricking a device.

I merely posted a very similar thing that Apple actually did.

Nothing about the police trying to find the perps.

I would be astounded if some of the local police squad were not in on the scheme. Along with workers at the plant.
These GPUs are gone. Eventually some flunky may be brought forward and put in jail.

Meanwhile, these GPUs are mining away.
 
Besides which, knowing the way this company operates, I have two schools of thought on this.

One is, couldn't have happened to a more deserving company.

Two, this is probably where those cards went anyhow. And then write off the loss while still making money off it. This is nothing that the mafia and drug kingpins haven't been knowing to do for years, and probably one of those is involved in the subsidiary company anyhow.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/msi-subsidiary-caught-scalping-rtx-3080-3090-cards-on-ebay
 
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