Employees Arrested For Using Nuclear Power Plant To Mine Cryptocurrency

Crypto mining has had an upward trend with many users taking advantage of easily accessible
power to mine cryptocurrency and earn a few coins. But it has led some to turn to unlikely power sources. As for Ukraine, its South Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant found a new use for some officials working on the plant.

Security Service of Ukraine (SBU ) has arrested several individuals for illegally mining cryptocurrency at the state’s nuclear power plant.

The miners installed several bitcoin mining equipments at one of the administrative blocks of the nuclear power plant, in a bid to take advantage of the uninterruptible power supply as well as the plant’s internet connectivity.

A syndicate of illegal mining

The SBU says it also conducted a search
operation at the premises of the National Guard, which is the security unit of the nuclear power plant and it discovered and confiscated several crypto mining equipments there.

That’s not all, the SBU claims it also seized various kinds of crypto mining machines at the premises of the military unit of the National Guard of Ukraine.

Illegal Mining on the Rise

With the growing popularity of bitcoin, rogue actors will always seize every opportunity to get rich quickly with cryptos.

It’s worth noting that this is not the first time that government officials are being arrested for unauthorized mining of cryptoassets with state computers while on duty.

Earlier in 2018, Russian police apprehended several nuclear scientists for using the most sophisticated supercomputers to mine bitcoin.

More recently in February this year, German police arrested six miners for mining bitcoin with stolen electricity and also the Australian Federal
Police arrestedand charged a guy for mining cryptos with the computers of a federal government agency.

Image credit: Asia Review