Word has surfaced that Modern Warfare 3 discs were stolen from the production facility, with pirated discs currently in circulation.

The discs have not yet appeared online on the NFO dumps, but a partial copy of Modern Warfare 3's single player disc for the PC can now be found on various torrent websites. Weighing in at 7.4GB, the copy has no multiplayer functionality.

According to VentureBeat, an employee at a shipping warehouse in California stole one of the discs, which was presumably the single player disc.

Activision has hired investigators to go to the homes of known owners of the pirated version to return the copy, or face a fine of $5,000 and a permanent ban from playing online.

It's doubtful that the threat will do much good given the game's availability on bittorrent. But if you get caught, don't say they didn't warn you.