Following reports that an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 shipment worth £370,000 was stolen from a Brazilian airport, one of the missing graphics cards has seemingly appeared on the secondhand market. The card was identified thanks to its serial number, which the seller forgot to hide.
On September 20, a shipment estimated to be worth R$ 2,500,000 (£370,000) was registered with Brazilian customs. This shipment contained two pallets of Zotac RTX 5090 cards imported from the US by IT distributor Oderço. A couple of weeks later, the airport formally acknowledged it could not locate the pallets.
It turns out that someone had stolen them. After contacting the police and starting an investigation, it was believed that two outsourced forklift operators removed these pallets from the warehouse, as spotted by CCTV cameras. A third employee is also believed to have released the merchandise from the system to pass through electronic controls.
Fast forward to this week, and one of the missing Zotac RTX 5090 Solid OC cards appeared online on a local marketplace called OLX, before being spotted by a Brazilian news outlet. It was identified thanks to its serial number, which was visible on the listing photos, with numbers matching those of the missing cargo. The card was listed at R$ 32,000 (£4,739).
Despite this rookie mistake, it seems that this evidence wasn’t sufficient to identify the seller. The listing also appears to have been taken down. That said, this doesn’t mean the police investigation is over, especially with three suspects identified.
Beyond the fact that these are stolen goods, any unsuspecting buyer may discover the deception too late, perhaps after if they contact Zotac’s customer support for an RMA after a long time has passed.
It seems that the demand for AI compute has made gaming GPUs so valuable that some people think it’s worth taking the risk of a prison sentence to steal them. According to recent reports, the RTX 5090 is effectively discontinued, and the incoming RTX 5080 Super price is rumoured to be around $2,999.
