If you have ever stayed at an esports hotel in China, you know the premise is absolute heaven for gamers. You book a room, order some late-night food, and get access to a high-end gaming PC right next to your bed so you can grind ranked matches all night long.
Unfortunately, two enterprising thieves in the city of Shihezi saw these cozy setups and had a completely different idea. Instead of trying to rank up in VALORANT or League of Legends, a dynamic duo named Li and Cheng decided to turn esports hotels into their own personal PC component harvest grounds, quietly dismantling rigs inside their rooms and walking out with the RAM sticks.
The High Stakes Heist of… Memory Sticks?
Most hardware thieves usually go straight for the big prize. They shove massive graphics cards into their backpacks or try to yank high-end CPUs off the motherboard. But Li and Cheng chose an oddly specific path. They ignored the GPUs and processors entirely and focused exclusively on memory modules, reported IXBT Games.
Capitalizing on rising global memory prices, Li started the spree solo back in May before recruiting Cheng to scale up the operation. Over two weeks, the duo checked into four different esports hotels, cracked open the computer cases, popped out 16 RAM sticks, and quietly checked out.
They proceeded to flip the stolen silicon on second-hand marketplaces and local tech shops, netting a grand total of around 13,200 yuan, which comes out to roughly $1,950 USD.
How the Entire Master Plan Came Crashing Down
For a brief moment, the RAM bandits probably felt like criminal geniuses. Shoving a couple of thin memory sticks into a pocket is infinitely easier than walking through a hotel lobby trying to hide a massive triple-fan graphics card under a jacket.
The flaw in their plan was simple math. If you steal a GPU or a CPU, the computer turns on and throws an error code, or runs terribly. If you remove all the RAM from a motherboard, the system will not boot.
When subsequent hotel guests checked in, turned on the PCs, and were greeted with completely black screens, they immediately complained to the front desk. Staff opened up the cases, realized the memory slots were completely empty, checked the room logs, and called the police.
Why They Should Have Left One Stick Behind
Looking back at the whole situation, the downfall of the RAM thieves boils down to pure greed. If Li and Cheng had left a single stick of RAM in each PC, the systems still would have booted up. The next guests would have just suffered through horrible frame rate drops and stuttering, assuming the hotel’s Wi-Fi was bad or the game needed an update.
Instead, by stripping the motherboards completely bare, they guaranteed an immediate investigation. Both men are now in police custody, facing criminal charges. It turns out that risking real jail time for less than two thousand bucks’ worth of second-hand memory sticks is a terrible trade offer.
