Yesterday, Cointelegraph reported the theft of electricity in the city of Klingenthan, Saxony, Germany. A group of suspects (consisting of five men and a woman- as per local German news site called- ‘FreiePresse’) have been arrested by the local police. This group was operating a crypto mining farm that consisted of a system of 49 computers in the nearby area of the ex- electrical services company called- PGH Elektro.
The mining farm has been reportedly used up electricity amount that could be used by at- least 30 houses, since 2017. A rough estimation of the electricity stolen by the group is 220,000 Euros which is almost 250,053 U.S. Dollars.
Going by the reports of a local German news site called- FreiePresse, out of these 49 computers that were used in the electricity theft, 30 had dedicated crypto mining hardware. These computers have 80 graphics processing units i.e. GPUs installed in them.
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Back in December 2018, another electricity stealing case was reported in which a Taiwanese man was arrested for stealing electricity which was worth more than 3 million dollars. He did so in order to mine Bitcoin BTC and Ethereum ETH. Initially, this man was accused of stealing electricity worth more than 100 million yuan which is equivalent to 14.5 million dollars. It is reported that he hired electricians to rewire the place so that he can escape electricity metering and therefore, stay clean of any stealing blames.
On the other hand, in China, another electricity stealing case was reported. As a result, a Chinese citizen called ‘Xinghua’ was sentenced to 3.5 years for the crime. The accused person stole electricity from a train station in order to back up his BTC mining process. In reports, it was revealed that he stole power from one of the plants at Kouquan Railway for two months- November and December 2017. He used this power to mine his 50 Bitcoin miners and three electric fans. In April, he successfully managed to mine 3.2 Bitcoin that earned him 120000 Yuan which equals to be 17400 U.S. Dollars. The electricity bill that came as a result of this process was of 104,000 Yuan i.e. almost equal to 15000 U.S. Dollars.
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A similar case was also reported from Ukraine in May last year. In this case, the employees of a local headquarters of the National Police in Rivne, mined crypto at work for good 4 months. The raid revealed the involvement of 8 video GPUs, 6 power supply units, 2 hard drives, a motherboard, and a fully operational computer system unit.
