Two men in China came up with a blunt little con to walk off with pricey PC parts from esports hotels — esp. venues where guests expect top-tier rigs.
They booked rooms with machines advertised as running GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 cards, then opened the cases and swapped the high-end GPUs for older RTX 3060s that, at a glance, looked almost the same. The replaced cards kept booting and behaved well enough; guests didn’t notice, and the hotels had no immediate reason to suspect anything.
It ran smoothly — until it didn't. On July 18 a room suffered a power fault after a botched hardware tweak. An electrician was called; staff spotted signs of case tampering and an inspection turned up that two RTX 5080 cards were missing.
Wuhan police say the pair picked targets online and flipped the stolen gear for about half the retail price. In total they’re linked to at least four thefts, roughly ¥80,000 (≈$12,000) worth of kit. Arrests followed on July 20, and officers seized two video cards the suspects hadn’t yet sold.