Police in Ukraine have made a large bust of a cryptomining operation stealing $259,300/mo in electricity.

[Kisai]

 

Summary

Police in Ukraine have made a large bust of a cryptomining operation stealing $259,300/mo in electricity.

 

Quotes

Quote

A huge underground cryptocurrency mining operation has been busted by Ukraine police for allegedly stealing electricity from the grid.

Police said they'd seized 5,000 computers and 3,800 games consoles that were being used in the illegal mine, the largest discovered in the country.

 

The mine, in the city of Vinnytsia, near Kyiv, stole as much as $259,300 in electricity each month, the Security Service of Ukraine said. To conceal the theft, the operators of the mine used electricity meters that did not reflect their actual energy consumption, officials said.

 

My thoughts

Given how many people seem to attribute shortages to scalpers, it's interesting to see what else has been used. Take a look at the photos and notice the Playstation logo on them. Note those appear to be PS4's. Too bad the photos don't show anything else.

 

Sources

https://www.yahoo.com/news/look-inside-underground-crypto-mining-090129713.html

https://ssu.gov.ua/en/novyny/sbu-vykryla-naibilshu-kryptofermu-v-ukraini-maizhe-5-tys-kompiuteriv-mainyly-hroshi-na-vinnytsiaoblenerho

 

UPDATE:

https://delo.ua/econonomyandpoliticsinukraine/kriptovaljuta-vinnica-fifa-384126/

Quote

A Delo.ua source in the SBU added that "top-end video cards" were seized, but this equipment has not really been evaluated yet. But on the issue of game consoles, our source put an end to it.

"It is on the PlayStation was well organized Leveling bot for FIFA And then selling them." - said the source Delo.ua.

 

So the PS4's were for an illegal bot farm. Run through machine translation.

[ARikozuM]

The storage design is genius, ngl. 

[The_russian]

Here's another pic from your second source: 

 

 

They have better cable management and in general look better organized than a lot of places I've seen...

[jagdtigger]

How the f they were mining on ps4s?

[Kisai]

14 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

How the f they were mining on ps4s?

Apparently something exists, but I guess we'd need to know what game they used to exploit it since you can clearly see a disc sticking out of most of them. 

 

[emosun]

1 hour ago, ARikozuM said:

The storage design is genius, ngl. 

yeah , who would have thought of shelves...

[Salv8 (sam)]

this farm must of been on a budget, those look like OG ps4's and not the pro's

[Bombastinator]

3 hours ago, emosun said:

yeah , who would have thought of shelves...

I think it was the foam spacer.  At least that stuck me as kind of a “yeah”

[Bombastinator]

The natural projection for cryptomining is the only people that will be able to do it will be those that get the electricity for free somehow. So criminals and utilities only. I can see this one using techniques for finding pot grow farms.  One that I could see also is electric space heaters becoming computers.  Why have an electric heater that doesn’t do computing work? Same heat. Would need a commodity cpu though.  Something like that could become a thing where mining gets done only on cold days. A house with asic baseboard heating or something.

[RejZoR]

15 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

The natural projection for cryptomining is the only people that will be able to do it will be those that get the electricity for free somehow. So criminals and utilities only. I can see this one using techniques for finding pot grow farms.  One that I could see also is electric space heaters becoming computers.  Why have an electric heater that doesn’t do computing work? Same heat. Would need a commodity cpu though.  Something like that could become a thing where mining gets done only on cold days. A house with asic baseboard heating or something.

I can optimize it further. Plant some Mary-Johanna and heat it with crypto mining righs around it. You'll mine crypto and use all that heat to grow the plants. And you can sell both then. Double efficiency.

[Brooksie359]

9 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

How the f they were mining on ps4s?

Probably alot easier to do when you don't have to worry about profitability as they are stealing electricity. Tbh that is a crazy number for electricity cost though. 

[StDragon]

5 hours ago, RejZoR said:

I can optimize it further. Plant some Mary-Johanna and heat it with crypto mining righs around it. You'll mine crypto and use all that heat to grow the plants. And you can sell both then. Double efficiency.

"Double the efficiency, double the crime..."

[Bombastinator]

6 hours ago, RejZoR said:

I can optimize it further. Plant some Mary-Johanna and heat it with crypto mining righs around it. You'll mine crypto and use all that heat to grow the plants. And you can sell both then. Double efficiency.

 

6 hours ago, RejZoR said:

I can optimize it further. Plant some Mary-Johanna and heat it with crypto mining righs around it. You'll mine crypto and use all that heat to grow the plants. And you can sell both then. Double efficiency.

I could totally see that happening

[Fasterthannothing]

Everyone laughed at people saying that mining rigs use game consoles to mine with. I really never understood why people didn't think that they would find a way to use them. 

[Bombastinator]

Thinking about that whole “Russian hackers” falderal.  Ukraine is apparently not an EU country.  It was Soviet bloc during the Cold War but that whole thing is long gone.  I don’t know how or to what degree it is allied with russia atm.  
 

I’m currently viewing most of that as being more or less volunteer created privateering with no actual letter of marque needed because of how things seem to work now.  I am a bit curious about the history of inter order criminal prosecution though

[akio123008]

Just now, Bombastinator said:

I don’t know how or to what degree it is allied with russia atm.

Haha oh boy. To a negative degree. Have a look at the borders on google maps.

 

12 hours ago, Kisai said:

stealing $259,300/mo in electricity.

The article says they used meters that didn't display the correct value, that shows how easy it apparently is to mess with that kind of stuff in these eastern european places. There could be a whole bunch more of these farms around.

[Flannelist]

3 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Thinking about that whole “Russian hackers” falderal.  Ukraine is apparently not an EU country.  It was Soviet bloc during the Cold War but that whole thing is long gone.  I don’t know how or to what degree it is allied with russia atm. 

Yeah. Ukraine and Russia are definitely NOT allied right now. They haven't seen eye to eye in a long time.

[wanderingfool2]

Got to give them credit, that wiring looks pretty good compared to some data centers I've seen.

 

I wonder how long it took them to get caught...I mean if you take the lower figure of $186,200 per month, assuming the rate is 19.5 (13*1.5) cents per kW (https://rubryka.com/en/article/elektroenergia-1-kvitny/)...that's 954.87 megawatts per month (30.8 mW/day or 1.28 mW/h).  If you take the upper range using 13cents per kW though it's 1,994 mW/month (64 mW/day or 2/68 mW/h)

 

I'd imagine that given they were in an energy crisis they would have spotted a rogue 1.28 mW/h...so it really makes me wonder how quickly they got caught

 

[akio123008]

4 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

that's 954.87 megawatts per month (30.8 mW/day or 1.28 mW/h).  If you take the upper range using 13cents per kW though it's 1,994 mW/month (64 mW/day or 2/68 mW/h)

energy is in Wh, power in W.

 

954 MWh / month = 30.8MWh / day = 1.28MWh / hour 

 

and since hour / hour = 1, MWh / hour = MW. The average power consumption would be 1.28MW. (the consumption of a passenger train accelerating at full power, and that's just on average)

[Bombastinator]

7 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Got to give them credit, that wiring looks pretty good compared to some data centers I've seen.

 

I wonder how long it took them to get caught...I mean if you take the lower figure of $186,200 per month, assuming the rate is 19.5 (13*1.5) cents per kW (https://rubryka.com/en/article/elektroenergia-1-kvitny/)...that's 954.87 megawatts per month (30.8 mW/day or 1.28 mW/h).  If you take the upper range using 13cents per kW though it's 1,994 mW/month (64 mW/day or 2/68 mW/h)

 

I'd imagine that given they were in an energy crisis they would have spotted a rogue 1.28 mW/h...so it really makes me wonder how quickly they got caught

 

My understanding is stealing electricity can be quite hard to detect depending on how it is done and how it is organized.  The trick apparently often involves a tap before the meter.  In the US it was quite common for illegal drug grow houses to steal the electricity they use to run grolights not because they even needed to buy because it made them harder to pinpoint.  One common police tactic was to use thermal cameras and look for buildings that were hotter than they should be according to bills.

[akio123008]

6 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

My understanding is stealing electricity can be quite hard to detect depending on how it is done and how it is organized.  The trick apparently often involves a tap before the meter.  In the US it was quite common for illegal drug grow houses to steal the electricity they use to run grolights

True, but stealing a casual 1.3MW on average is an entirely different level. Even a 125A three phase supply isn't big enough.

 

This isn't something you steal from a residential supply or a nearby lamppost 

[tikker]

24 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

One common police tactic was to use thermal cameras and look for buildings that were hotter than they should be according to bills.

Here they didn't even need thermal cameras. Just looking for houses without snow or ice on the roofs during winter would be enough to figure out who's cultivating groceries at home in their attic.

[Lacrima]

How are they even mining btc on ps4's?

[Helpful Tech Witch]

8 minutes ago, ArdaBarda said:

How are they even mining btc on ps4's?

The PS4 has been cracked and can run whatever Linux programs you want, that means you can mine on them

[DeScruff]

These images reminds me of how the US airforce made a super computer comprised of 1700 PS3s back in the day.

 

https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html