Ukraine Police Bust Massive Crypto Mining Operation Stealing Electricity

Business Insider reports: A huge underground cryptocurrency mining operation has been busted by Ukraine police for allegedly stealing electricity from the grid. Police said they'd seized 5,000 computers and 3,800 games consoles that were being used in the illegal mine, the largest discovered in the country.

The mine, in the city of Vinnytsia, near Kyiv, stole as much as $259,300 in electricity each month, the Security Service of Ukraine said. To conceal the theft, the operators of the mine used electricity meters that did not reflect their actual energy consumption, officials said.

"Such illegal activity could lead to power surges and left people without electricity," the security service said.

Re:

[Moryath]

What do you expect? Cryptocurrencies are a ponzi scheme setup to begin with. It stands to reason people would try to find ways to mine them while pushing the energy costs off onto others. And of course there's the environmental impacts [arstechnica.com] we're all going to have to suffer for the greed involved in crypto scammery too...

Re:

[rtb61]

The theft is really quite amusing, when you stop to really think about it's nature. They were converting energy directly into a criminal currency, which enabled the theft of that energy. Only capitalism as a religion could deliver such an absurdity. The ability to steal that energy was created by the availability of a criminal currency to achieve that conversions, wasted energy turned into criminal worth, so delightful, capitalism as a religion, delivering one of it core values, the illusion of worth. They

Re:

[whitroth]

ROTFL.
You're "non-BORG"? With that line of patter, you're not only BORG, but you're one of the really low-level BORGs... the kind that monitor the floor sweeping robots.

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

I was going to say cryptocurrency is a troll-meme, but 'ponzi scheme' is even better. Regardless it's cancerous. It's mainly used by criminals, and now we're seeing that just 'mining' it is encouraging criminal activity, too. It's just bad all around. It should never have been created in the first place, and it shouldn't be encouraged either. I wish governments would just crack down on it and erradicate it, doing that by itself would probably curb ransomware attacks if not obliterate them entirely.

Re:

[yes-but-no]

I am not sure it is easy for govt to ban. Govt may be slow due to things like lobbying (surely the criminal biz nicely lines their[politicians] pockets). Also you can't ban a legal activity -- paying for electricity and doing math computation using a computer.

So the way the mania can end is thru' self implosion; like how the 2k tech bubble or dutch tulip leaf (stock market bubble) imploded. Suddenly mania should set in that drive crypto currency to rock bottom to near zero. So what govt can do is aid in

Re:

[gnasher719]

I am not sure it is easy for govt to ban. Govt may be slow due to things like lobbying (surely the criminal biz nicely lines their[politicians] pockets). Also you can't ban a legal activity -- paying for electricity and doing math computation using a computer.

Computers and game consoles + paying for electricity leaves no profit. And no money for bribing anyone. Banning crypto-mining is very easy for a government. Just add one paragraph to criminal law, giving you 10 years in jail for each bitcoin minded. To enforce it, whoever turns them in gets to keep the bitcoin :-)

Re:

[yes-but-no]

In a democracy how do you ban an activity, say xyz. Unless you can clearly prove it does more harm than good and get approval in congress/parliament. Why mining is going on for so long (even though it causes massive environmental damage due to the wrong use of electricity)? Because you can't show the activity xyz is in-deed bad for society as a whole.
The folks who want the game to go on, will surely stop any new law and it is hard to prove that xyz is causing societal harm more than good.

This is simil

Possession of stolen crypto

[The New Guy 2.0]

Seems like another lack of governmental force problem in crypto... these guys thought they could have profit with small expensive. Power is never free.

That's okay

[The Evil Atheist]

This is okay, because geekmux claims this is better than some imagined future where we judge each other's electricity use.

To put a long story short

[kot-begemot-uk]

The criminals forgot to pay off someone in the electricity supplier. As a result their farm was miraculously found and busted.

The other ones will now pay on time.

Welcome to the realities of post-USSR.