The PC graphics cards that EVGA lost to thieves last year in California may have ended up for sale in Vietnam. A Facebook user in the region claims he bought an EVGA RTX 3080 Ti card only to realize the card was among the GPUs that were stolen.
The original post seems to have been deleted. However, a saved screenshot from Duy Nguyen says he bought the RTX 3080 Ti from a Vietnamese retailer that offered an unusual stipulation about the product: the graphics card’s warranty would only be honored for one month.
Nguyen decided to buy the product anyway, citing his positive experiences with EVGA’s customer service. However, a friend later told him about the batch of GPUs EVGA lost last fall. This prompted Nguyen to go to the company’s warranty website, which told him the bad news—the GPU he purchased had indeed come from the stolen shipment.
According to his post, Nguyen purchased the RTX 3080 Ti from a local Vietnamese electronics vendor called Nguyen Cong Computer, also known as NCPC. Last month, the retailer advertised a large sale of EVGA graphics cards.
On Monday, NCPC posted an apology on Facebook about the incident, saying the stolen GPU came from a separate supplier named “Hoang Minh,” which stipulated the one-month warranty.
NCPC only learned that the graphics card were stolen after a customer entered the serial number into EVGA’s warranty website. “In fact, we were just victims and did not have any prior notice about this shipment,” said NCPC, which plans to recall the affected GPUs.
NCPC said it “contacted Hoang Minh company and they replied that they would take all responsibility for the incident and told us to withdraw the VGA batch for them.”
EVGA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in November, the company indicated it knew the serial numbers of every stolen GPU, and planned on cutting off warranty services for them. This incident answers a lingering question about where would the stolen products would end up. It seems the criminals behind the theft sold the GPUs to middle-men suppliers, who then shipped them off to Asia.
NCPC added that video cards have been scarce, which created a large supply chain of middle-men dealers offering the GPUs.
