Key Takeaways
- Ukraine shuts down illegal mining farm
- 3400 PS4 seized among other electronic gadgets
- Crypto mining increasingly popular globally
Officials stated that the mining facility is the largest illegal mining farm uncovered far. The mining farm was located in a remote abandoned building of a company. The operators were able to hide their activities by deploying electrical meters that provided false energy consumption.
It is estimated that the organization was consuming $259,000 monthly from the city grid. The amount of electricity is thought to have caused blackouts and power outages within the city. What was surprising was that the mining operators used PS4s to run their facilities, with a total of 3,800 consoles seized. In addition, police also confiscated laptops, phones, and 500 GPUs.
Ukraine officials are currently trying to track the operators of the facilities and hinted that a staff of the electricity provider was involved in the scheme. The Eastern European country is no stranger to illegal mining facilities, and authorities regularly make raids on suspected locations.
Earlier in the year, the SSU closed an illegal facility in the Chernihiv region that contained over 100 ASICs machines that reportedly mined Bitcoins.
Mining cryptocurrencies with gaming consoles is not new but certainly not popular within the crypto space. PS4 retails at around $450 and typically includes strong processors with 8GB of RAM for the newer versions.
This makes it a solid setup for mining cryptocurrencies. The presence of over 3000 PS4s showed that the operators harvested the total power output to mine desired cryptocurrencies. Crypto mining is a popular activity within countries with excess electricity production, but most miners operate without permits globally.
Ukraine is one of the countries that has been working on a crypto framework and is set to pass its first crypto bill in the coming weeks.
What do you think about illegal crypto mining activities?
