Tech

Polish police discovered illegal bitcoin farm in their own HQ

A computer scientist employed at the Warsaw Police Headquarters sought to divert electricity in order to mine cryptocurrencies. The police claim that they discovered and “quickly” put an end to their illicit activity.

It is sometimes under everyone’s nose that we are best hidden. Police in Warsaw, Poland, discovered their own prefecture was home to an illegal cryptocurrency farm. Police spokesman Mariusz Ciarka confirmed to the local TV channel TVN24 that a civilian employee working on the IT part had “ sought to divert electricity in order to mine bitcoin “.

He assured that the employee’s activity had been detected ” quickly ”, Without however giving details on the period which elapsed between the beginning of the misdeeds and their discovery. The employee at fault was – unsurprisingly – dismissed and is currently the subject of an investigation, specifies the American TV channel ABC.

Source: Sinisamaric1 / Pixabay

Stolen electricity to mine bitcoins

He is far from the first person to hijack professional equipment or steal electricity to mine cryptocurrency. The latter arouse more and more interest. Even after having suffered serious setbacks in China (which has almost banned mining on its soil), bitcoin for example still stands at more than 32,000 euros on August 3. And miners are already starting to redeploy their equipment to other countries.

If some cryptocurrencies are expensive, mining them requires enduring and powerful equipment and above all a lot of electricity. It is for this reason that miners so actively seek the areas where electricity is the cheapest (many of them did not hesitate to relocate to the Sichuan region, during the monsoon season, because the The energy captured by the many dams in the region was abundant and inexpensive).

The war on illegal crypto farms

In this kind of Wild West that crypto mining sometimes looks like, some – like the employee of the police headquarters apprehended in Warsaw – do not hesitate to cross the red line and steal electricity. In July 2021, several Malaysians were sentenced to prison after stealing $ 2 million in electricity. The local police, visibly overwhelmed with the problem posed by illegal crypto farms, destroyed the miners’ equipment in a spectacular way, to say the least: they crushed their thousand machines with a steamroller. An inefficient way to send a message: the machines were worth over a million dollars.

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