A Massachusetts man is accused of secretly mining cryptocurrency in a middle school crawlspace, wasting $18,000 of energy.
Friday, Nadeam Nahas entered a not-guilty plea in Quincy District Court, one day after failing to appear for an arraignment and having an arrest warrant issued.
Masachusetts Man’s Cryptocurrency Mining Operations
The assistant facilities director for the town of Cohasset, Nahas, is accused of connecting the school’s electrical system to help run the illegal operation from April to December 2021, which lasted about nine months.
The director of facilities at Cohasset Middle/High School alerted authorities when he discovered electrical wires, computers, and temporary ducting in a crawlspace near the school’s boiler room.
Along with the town’s IT director, the police discovered a clandestine bitcoin mining operation comprising eleven powerful computers and cooling equipment.
As the Coast Guard Investigation Service and the Department of Homeland Security were called in to discover the perpetrator, the situation in the little hamlet intensified. Nahas was identified as the suspect following a three-month inquiry, and he resigned from his position in March 2022.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy claims that the mining of bitcoin, which involved using computers to verify transactions by solving challenging equations, used a large amount of electricity.
The OSTP estimates that as of August 2022, published estimations of the total global electricity consumption for crypto-assets range from 120 to 240 billion kilowatt-hours annually.
This range exceeds the annual electricity consumption of many countries, like Argentina or Australia. The University of Cambridge estimates that one of the many cryptocurrencies, bitcoin, uses about 14 gigawatts of electricity daily.
According to the Department of Energy, bitcoin’s daily energy requirements would require installing nearly 43 million solar panels or 4,662 utility-scale wind turbines.
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Suspect Steals Electricity To Operate Crypto Mining
Many suspects, including Nahas, are accused of stealing electricity to operate cryptocurrency mining operations.
During an electrical theft crackdown in 2021, Malaysia confiscated 1,720 bitcoin mining machines and detained over 600 people for stealing electricity to mine cryptocurrencies during the previous two years, according to Crypto News.
A Chinese kennel owner was jailed in 2020 for stealing electricity to fuel a bitcoin mining plant. According to a new report, two brothers were detained in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 2016 for stealing energy to mine bitcoin and grow cannabis.
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