Two men in China hatched a complex plan to steal expensive components from esports hotels. After entering a room equipped with powerful gaming PCs based on GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5070, the attackers carefully opened the system unit and replaced the flagship graphics card with an older and cheaper RTX 3060 that looked similar to the original card.
The scam worked surprisingly well: the hotel wasn’t even aware of the theft because the old graphics card still worked after rebooting the system, and guests didn’t complain about performance. However, criminals have an opportunity. On July 18, a power outage occurred in one of the rooms due to a failed attempt to operate the iron. The staff contacted the electrician and found that the case had signs of being hacked. Subsequent inspection revealed that two RTX 5080 graphics cards were missing.
According to Wuhan police, the couple chose a hotel online and sold the stolen equipment for about half the price. The attackers were involved in at least four cases, totaling about 80,000 yuan (about 12,000 US dollars). Police arrested the suspect on July 20 and seized two video cards that had not yet been sold.
