Two individuals in China recently made headlines after they were detained by local authorities for allegedly stealing 16 RAM modules from gaming PCs installed in hotel rooms. Not only that, but it is alleged that the duo had hit four Esports Hotels within that region.
The case of the stolen RAM sticks reportedly occurred in the city of Shihezi, which is located in the Xinjiang region of China. The thieves were reprimanded after an operator at one of the Esports Hotels encountered problems with certain PCs during routine maintenance. It was only after they opened up the affected systems that they discovered the missing RAM, presumably DDR5, from the systems and proceeded to retrace the steps of the thieves and report them to the authorities.
As mentioned, the thieves stole a total of 16 RAM sticks from four hotels in nearly a fortnight. With each pilfer, they sold their ill-gotten gains through second-hand trading platforms and physical PC stores, for a total amount of US$1,840 (~RM7,526).
Honestly, you’d think after the last time such an incident happened, and given the skyrocketing value of memory and storage in this current market, Esports hotels would be more vigilant with their gaming rigs in individual hotel rooms. To provide some context to this statement, last year, another Esports hotel lost multiple units of AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPUs and NVIDIA RTX 5070 GPUs to thieves posing as hotel guests.
Granted, the cost of memory and storage components just a year ago was half the price of what they cost now, but the point here is that the temptation of a high-end gaming PC, left all by its lonesome with no security cameras in sight (due to privacy laws)…well, you get the idea.
These cases aren’t just isolated to China either. Earlier this year, news emerged from South Korea of a thief that broke into a office, only to steal the valuable DDR5 RAM from PCs and leave. Yes, really. Nothing else in the system or office was touched, indicating that the thief clearly knew what they were after and were surgical about their actions.
(Source: GMW via Videocardz)
