Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/09/thieves-steal-stash-of-gpus-worth-336000.html
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A couple of boxes fell from a truck. At $1.500 per card that would be 224 cards in total, so those containers held around 5-6 cards each.
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And the reward/bounty only amounts to US $15,313.50 (XE Currency Exchange) on the day of this post, so not a huge incentive to come clean. 
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So you’re saying these ain’t no two-bit crooks?
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I was going to joke “Three of them?”, but doing the math shows it’s still really not a whole lot of cards.
I can’t see myself spending $1000+ on a video card, unless I had a specific need for a pro card. I’m far better served by staying a couple of notches down from the top end, where the price/performance ratio is much better. My last card, still in use, is a GTX 960, bought when it was one generation behind. I don’t need bragging rights, I just need a reasonably powerful GPU.
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“Container” initially gave me an impression more like the below; which would be a much bigger heist. I would have described the sort of boxes actually stolen as “overpack”; but I’m not sure if that’s strictly correct outside of contexts where the packaging in question is definitely the outermost layer of packaging in a shipping context.
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People are funny. They’ll spend $1000 on a smart phone, or $200/mo on a contract. And how many people spend several times that on their home theater, even just on their speakers and hi-fi amplifier?
It seems pretty reasonable to also spend that kind of money on a hobby you’re really into (gaming). Of course I’d rather pay the $700 retail price than the $2500 street price, paying that kind of premium would sting my Midwestern sensibilities too much.
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I imagine that the strength of the request for leniency would be of more interest to the actual perp; but $15k, even without any adjustments for local cost of living/buying power, could well be a significant inducement for anyone who doesn’t have primary culpability but heard someone running their mouth about it or was weakly related to the situation but wasn’t expecting it to blow up like this.
I’m not an expert on the unwritten rules of stealing from work, and wouldn’t admit it if I were; but I suspect that there are some people who are willing to look the other way for lower profile technically-not-authorized-diversions; but are feeling pretty cold footed about 6 figures worth of cutting edge product and the people sniffing after it.
I think that the major disincentive for $1000 GPUs isn’t so much unwillingness to spend on a hobby; but the fact that such cards are usually toward the top of the range where the price/performance ratio starts to look really bad compared to the ones a notch or two down; and most gamers aren’t working with a budget large enough that they can just max out everything and ignore the trade-offs they are making between GPU/CPU/memory/storage/monitor(s)/etc.
I’d definitely be in line to buy an expensive GPU, if my current anhedonia weren’t intense enough that I can’t really even get motivated to play video games anymore; but justifying a 3090 against, say, a 3080 or 3070 plus a better solid state storage system to reduce load times; or a spiffy new monitor, is tricky.
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I’m no techie, but I wonder if cards have serialized ways of being identified, like copiers or fax machines?
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Have experience something similar, albeit second hand.
Many decades ago, used to work at a logistics company, where we add serial number stickers to manufacturer boxes and actually puts the devices in thus create the retail boxes which are then shipped to the retailers. According to company scuttlebutt, thieves hit our yard late at night and cut the locks on one of the containers containing stuff ready to be picked up next day. Not sure how much was lost, but as retail boxes, they couldn’t have gotten too many. If they came with a truck and took a couple pallets, it would be a different story.
On the other hand, some of the most brazen thefts had been of entire containers of nuts.
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They absolutely do. If you’re on an Nvidia-equipped Linux box, nvidia-smi -L will show the card’s UUID.
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The company should check to see if any employees have a sudden spike in online gaming scores.
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Throw some blockchain at the problem! /s
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This sounds like it’s the start of a new Fast and Furious franchise or even a Soderbergh movie.
Between the cryptocurrency and the gaming angle, a Fast and Furious heist involving the lifting of a shipping container full of graphics cards would be plausible enough a foundation I suppose.
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