As if the chip shortage didn’t make it hard enough to get our hands on graphics cards, criminals are making it a heck of a lot worse. According to a forum post by EVGA product manager Jacob Freeman, thieves made off with a whole truckload of EVGA RTX 30-Series graphics cards. The graphic cards were in transit from San Francisco to EVGA’s southern California distribution center at the time of the theft, and it remains unclear how many cards were affected.
If you think you may have a card that was involved in this theft, you can find out by entering your card’s serial number on EVGA’s warranty status page. You can also check by attempting to register your card on the My Products section of this site — if you can properly register your card, you can rest assured that it wasn’t snatched from the shipment.
The post warns users that it’s illegal to “buy or receive” stolen goods, as well as “conceal, sell, withhold, or aid in concealing selling or withholding” that property. EVGA also says that it “will not register or honor any warranty or upgrade claims“ on stolen cards.
Freeman couldn’t give The Verge any more details about the truck heist due to an ongoing police investigation, however, he did say in an email that “If a user has a question we urge them to contact us [at] stopRTX30theft@evga.com. If a user does end up acquiring a stolen card, we will address [it] on a case by case basis.”
This isn’t the first time that a large shipment of graphics cards has been stolen, and, unfortunately, it’s probably not the last. At the end of 2020, about $340,000 worth of GeForce RTX 3090s were stolen from MSI’s factory in mainland China. Graphics cards have become a prime target for thieves and scalpers — the MSRP for an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is $1,499 but if scalpers have their way, this can skyrocket to $2,000 and beyond.
