$38k RTX 3070 Ti Russian Warehouse Theft Foiled

Warehouse operatives who attempted to steal a batch of twenty Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics cards have been detained by police, and their swag confiscated, reports Mash, in a story spotted by VideoCardz. What appears to have been a trio of thieves (two insiders and an outsider) were recorded on camera purloining the score of desirable GPUs from a warehouse owned by Russia's largest online retailer, Wildberries.

In the video shared by Mash yesterday, and watched by nearly a million netizens, you can see the thieves stroll casually but purposefully through the Wildberries warehouse, wheeling several non-descript cardboard boxes through the corridors.

The camera angle changes and shows the thieves wheel their boxes under a stairwell. A few seconds later they are grabbing Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics cards from the boxes under the stairs, and running up the stairs. The camera view changes again and you can see the two insiders dropping bundles of graphics card boxes from an upper window to someone waiting outside, below. After that the footage ends, but one must assume the outsider runs off and loads these boxes into his car or van.

The story source publication takes us from there. It says that the thieving trio decided to sell one of the shiny new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics cards to a local pawn shop (for 60,000 rubles, or approx $572), as a test for their illicit money making scheme. The owner of the shop was somewhat suspicious about the provenance of the goods, so decided to inform police.

Naturally, as these were stolen goods, the police found and detained the thieves and confiscated all the stolen graphics cards. We don't know how many cards were left to be confiscated as it is possible the thieves sold some of the  20 GPUs to other pawn shops or their friends or acquaintances.

The source report says that a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti sells for 200,000 rubles in Russia (about $1,908), but the thieves were happy with 60,000 per piece (about $572). If they had successfully fenced all 20, the possible proceedings could have been equivalent to $11,440 from goods with a local market value of $38,140. Crime doesn't pay folks.

It is worth mentioning that graphics cards and other computer components are going to get more expensive and hard to find in Russia as sanctions bite. Early on in the Russia - Ukraine war companies like AMD, Intel and Nvidia decided to limit their Russia business. More recently the biggest PC components names like Asus, Gigabyte and MSI have fallen in line.