US Customs supervisor busted for stealing Core i7 CPUs, RAM, and hard drives from Homeland Security PCs, damage estimated at $105,800 — stolen tech swapped with inferior hardware and cashed out on New
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/us-customs-supervisor-busted-for-stealing-core-i7-cpus-ram-and-hard-drives-from-homeland-security-pcs-stolen-tech-swapped-with-inferior-hardware-and-cashed-out-on-neweggOpen linkView original on lemmus.org
81 replies
105k? I hope they recovered both the CPUs...
Only one CPU, but 64gb of ram, so a win overall.
Came here to say this, LOL.
This is basically what the GOP is doing to the federal government.
46 times? What were they waiting for?!
Their cut.
I like how this dude basically did the inverse of pc servicing during his night shift, but it's somehow gonna cost more than $100k to do the exact same thing to swap the correct components. Classic government math lol
???? The amount is gonna be 100k because they have to buy the components and see if the damage has been compromised for the software. That shit adds up expeditiously.
Have you seen the cost of computer components recently?
$20k worth of hardware last month would cost around $100k this month
He was doing the work “for free” because he was gonna get paid by selling the stolen parts (or else he was double dipping). Point is, the government has to pay someone else to fix em
Pre-builts are cheaper than single components but they only had the contact for the computers and technically they still have the cases, maybe motherboards too, so they'd be over strength if they bought more prebuilts. So now they have to go off economy if they want to get those computers working again or deal with the hassle of turning in the old equipment, waiting for it to fall off the books and then ordering "new" equipment but during that time people wouldn't be working so you might spend 80k to avoid spending 1M in salaries to avoid waiting to spend 20k.
Some of the computers has Raptor Lake processors and they were replaced with Pentiums?
Lacking more evidence I'm going to wager this person was swapping stuff on equipment that had already been turned in because I can't picture a world where someone who knows enough about computers to know what parts to take and has a pile of pentiums to work with tries that on anything someone's expected to use. Then again emailing one's personal account from an official account about Illegal Activity kind of makes me wonder.
"Degraded performance" sounds like a euphamism.
Government bad
So the USA is becoming the USSR
Collapsing empires express a lot of similar symptoms
Yeah a lot of us noticed when we were in Afghanistan
More and more it feels like the USA didn’t win the Cold War, the USSR just lost first
Those are rookie numbers (c)
I didn't know Pentium shared the same socket.
Twenty-seven years later, and it is still all about the Pentiums.
Now Wierd Al is stuck in my head. A genuine thanks!
Few things are worse than Weird Al songs stuck in your head. He's great and I actually listen to the words of his song. Don't a lot of the time just hear the melody but Al is funny. Just recently watched the Simpsons with him singing, was an amusing random watch. He helped me understand satire better, though always a fan of cheesy satire from Mel Brooks, National Lampoons and of course UHF. For movies I'll also add, Spaceballs (Men in Tights, but never fully watched Blazing Saddles outside of bits which is by all accounts awesome), loaded weapon one and well Mr Als UHF in case people wanted something less than serious to watch sometime. In the vein of 'cant rain all the time'(Original Crow movie), can't always be serious and just need a funny one. Though I do know the humour isn't for all.
Just ask Don McLean. Getting an artist to forget their own lyrics on stage in favor of your parody has to be some kind of lifetime achievement for a parody artist.
Blazing Saddles is a hilarious satire on racism. You should absolutely watch it.
A friend recently went to a Weird Al concert and said he was very energetic the entire time. I'm jealous... I didn't even know he was touring.
That dude is basically always touring. He’s incredibly hard working
27? First Pentium came out in 1993…
Yikes, that was around the time I knew the Amiga was a dead end and reluctantly bought a 100MHz Pentium outfit. The speed, memory, and resolution was far above anything I did with my Amiga 3000 but it wasn't as much fun. Wow that was a long time ago.
I'm so jelly you had an Amiga!! I only recently realized it was a Commodore! We loved Commodore computing back in the day. The blue screen where you'd type the commands was strangely serene (or maybe that's just my rose-colored glasses, lol)
Fun fact you can buy new production commodore 64s with mild modernizations.
They aren't Commodore 64s, they're FPGAs wrapped in a 64 styled box.
Legit didn't know and don't know what an FPGA is, just knew that someone resurrected the commodore brand and started to output shit. Also I kinda want their Linux flip phone.
That is a fun fact!! I'm gonna see what they're running these days.
They're certainly fun! Pricy for what amounts to a few existing community projects in a "new original mould" case but very easy to set up on modern TVs and 99% compatible with old hardware and software. Even internet capable with the right cart images to play on the BBSs that are still around.
I have one of my spare SIDs in mine. 😁
I still remember being soooooo fucking excited to see the next big step from a 486. I think we had a 486SX back when Pentium was current. I vaguely recall the Pentium chip being almost more like a cartridge in it's form-factor but i could be way off. Old school computing days were the best 💖
Pentium II introduced the cartridge, then for the P2 celerons they went back to socket 370. P3 offered both slot and socket CPUs.
And if you had a CPU for a socket but a board with a slot, you used a slocket adapter!
Ahhhh yes, thank you! I should have googled it but i was swimming in nostalgia, lol 😅
The song reference was 99 though. If you'll excuse me I need to get back to waxin' my modem, tryin to make it go faster.
My brain refuses to recognize that Running With Scissors is 27 years old!
They also had that fp bug, as op so generously demonstrated.
The Pentium became Intel's budget processor when the Core architecture came out. When the i7s, i5s, and i3s are tested and binned, the dies that are still fully functional but didn't quite muster i3 levels (only 1 or 2 cores work, some of the cache is defective, only works at lower power levels/clock speeds, etc) are binned as Pentiums.
The leftovers that aren't completely scrap are stamped as Celerons and Atoms.
I've grossly oversimplified it, but that's the general idea.
socket 1700 supports both alder lake (12th gen) and raptor lake (13th, refresh 14th gen) intel processors.
12th gen had low-end processors branded 'pentium', all three gens had the usual i3/i5/i7 (it was the next gen after this that rebranded intel's cpu lineup). the 14th gen low-end chip was rebranded without the 'pentium' trademark.
the same chipset and firmware quite often supported all three generations of cpu, enabling the easy cpu swap from 14th gen core i7 to 12th gen pentium.
They have to be talking about the Pentium Gold line, G7400 and such. It does sound silly though.
my guess is that he used heat gun, thermal pastes, and cleanly succeasfully swapped 40 PCs with matching parts without damaging any. This guy is a repair technician not customs supervisor
They've always been the same socket/silicon for the past 15-20 years. Just far FAR inferiorsince they're clocked down and don't have the full cache.
They kinda do, if you put in the effort.
Clever girls.
Actually a decent way to move the loot.
Apparently not that decent, because they were already caught
The thing that caught them was secret cameras, not tracing the parts back through a reseller. This worked well enough it didn't raise any flags with the feds who were looking for abnormalities.
So if you buy a used i7 processor from Newegg, there's a non-zero chance that who knows what went through it
and what is hidden in it.
In a CPU?
dude... have you seen the size of trackers nowadays?
Over $100,000, so 3 maybe 4 computers?
Just 1, but it has 128 GB of RAM
Dude what the hell are you talking about! Computers aren't that expensive. It's got be like 8 or 9 at least!
I guess stealing packages don't pay the bills any more.
I got some nicotine pouches that was supposed to come in from Sweden and it's been stuck in customs in Newark for over a month and a half now.
I had since made another order of the same stuff from the same vendor, it came in through a different port, and was delivered 2 days later.
I dunno what's going on in Newark but I suspect it's not going to be "destroyed", at least not in the means they expect.
I miss snus, hard to find around here since it didn't take off.
It used to be common to find it in head shops.
I was buying General from gas stations for a while but they stopped carrying it. I gotta order it if I want to get what I want, as in I like the mini pouches. But I haven't tried other brands so I don't even know what to order.
Helwit is the brand for you, promise
oh no, looked it up and they have watermelon flavor and cola?... I'll try it out just for that. Although I do also like unflavored snus as well.
Those are nicotine pouches. Real Swedish Snus is superior IMO, there's no alternative
Helwit is a Swedish brand, the only difference is if the plant material is tobacco or not.The macho attitude of "real snus" is such bullshit, especially since they asked for mini pouches lmao
Still, there is a big difference between actual tobacco and.. not tobacco. Snus is always a tobacco product, and the user is referring specifically to snus, not nicotine pouches.
Silly rabbit! Theft is for the filthy rich.
This implies that there are many more people doing the same with better ability to not get caught (yet).
trump would be proud. If you arnt stealing or grifting, you arnt in his inner circle.
Yeah but you gotta pay kick a percentage up to the boss. This guy got busted, so I guess he didn't do that.
Holy based
A true fucking hero.