Crypto Miner Arrested on Charges of Stealing Significant Amounts of Energy in China

Another crypto-related arrest has been made in China, this time involving a Chinese national who allegedly stole a significant amount of electricity to run his cryptocurrency mining endeavors. The crime was first noticed by a local electricity provider when it saw a high surge of power usage on a certain location.

The suspect, who was only identified by his surname Ma, stole power between April and May this year, which amounted to 150,000 kW hours. After tracing the mining location, authorities reportedly seized more than 200 computers used to mine Bitcoin and Ethereum, Coindesk reported.

After the arrest, Ma admitted to the police that he wanted to make a profit by mining cryptocurrencies. He purchased the hardware needed for his venture but didn’t take into account how much energy crypto mining consumes, which was more than 6,000 yuan ($921) per day on his case.

Crypto mining has already been reported to use large amounts of power to perform its operations. This is why miners are putting up headquarters in regions where renewable energy is abundant since it is cheap to buy energy from these places and they are environment-friendly.

Ma’s case has been reported to occur in the eastern part of China, in Anhui Province. Meanwhile, in Rui'an City in the province of Zhejiang, another investigation is currently unfolding, this time involving a group of programmers colluding with multiple computer maintenance firms to infect computers with malware at unsuspecting internet cafes.

Sixteen individuals have already been arrested, with more to be investigated as the malware has reportedly spread to 30 other cities in the country. Businesses that were hit by this syndicated crime saw their CPU usage surging up to 70 percent, drastically lowering the performance of the computers while simultaneously increasing the internet café’s energy bill.

The illicit endeavor is estimated to have produced more than 5 million yuan ($800,000) which was split among those involved. Authorities are still trying to dig out who else colluded with the programmers, with more than 100 computer maintenance companies being investigated.