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Two men in China found a way to profit from the RAM shortage, and they did it by stripping gaming PCs bare inside esports hotels.
After all, global memory prices have climbed so steeply this year that Valve blamed the shortage for the increased prices of the Steam Machine, and Costco reportedly started pulling RAM out of display units to stop shoplifters. Gaming hotels turned out to be an even easier target than a retail counter, since every room came pre-loaded with a PC nobody was watching, and a screwdriver was all it took to walk out with hardware worth more than the room itself.
The great esports hotel RAM heist
Chinese police arrested two men, identified only by their surnames Li and Cheng, after tracing a string of RAM thefts back to esports hotels in Shihezi City, in China’s Xinjiang region, according to a Chinese state media report translated by Tom’s Hardware.
Li worked alone at first and picked memory sticks out of the gaming PCs installed in hotel rooms built for esports players. He later brought in Cheng, and the two moved through several more hotels over the back half of May and pried loose a combined 16 RAM sticks from machines guests had every reason to trust.
Unsplash: possessedphotography
Even so, Li and Cheng weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. Between them, the pair pocketed only about 13,200 yuan, or roughly $1,950, from selling the stolen sticks through a mix of online marketplaces and brick-and-mortar shops.
And the scheme fell apart because guests who checked in after them found dead PCs with black screens where working memory used to sit. Hotel staff investigated the complaints and called police, and both men are now in custody while the case stays open.
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RAM has already pushed people to strange extremes elsewhere, like the Reddit user who flew from the UK to New York because hard drives worked out cheaper there.
