One of the highest electricity exporters in Europe has released evidence of the biggest fraud in history, connected to a huge illegal bitcoin mining farm in a remote Bulgarian village.
Bulgarian Electricity Company Uncovers Massive Electricity Theft Linked to Illegal Bitcoin Mining
According to Vesti, the CEZ Party and the Bulgarian police began investigating Dec. 12 in the village of Herakovo, municipality of Bozhurishte, leading to increasing allegations of irregularities in the supply of electricity.
What the authorities noticed, the study said, was that a large bitcoin mining farm had drained almost the entire medium-voltage electricity company network, as the miners had built transformers in a building that had driven over 1,000 ASIC machines to mine crypto.
The police immediately found the sources of the irregularities. They confiscated the whole illicit mining system, which had been "equivalent to the electricity supply for some 4,250 families for a month," rendering it the highest in its existence.
The local media outlet reported that the Ministry of the Interior has already negotiated a pre-trial process for the filing of criminal charges against the operators, without giving more information.
Illegal Crypto Mining Background in Bulgaria
Bulgaria is no stranger to headlines of illicit blockchain mining activities.
On 14 August, two men were arrested in Kyustendil, a small town related to another huge $1.5 million robbery of electricity used for BTC mining.
At the time, the leaders of the Oblast Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (ODMVR) and the CEZ Party reported that the two Bulgarians had robbed the power supply for three to six months.
As part of a multinational law enforcement investigation involving Europol, 20 people accused of contributing to the QQAAZZ crime network were detained on 15 October.
They are suspected of laundering tens of millions of euros on behalf of the organisation, and bitcoin mining machinery was confiscated in Bulgaria during the trials.
