An illegal bitcoin farm had been sucking electricity from the state-owned railway monopoly Ukrzaliznytsya, draining over $40,000 worth of electricity from the company.
The company’s own security department along with Ukraine’s National Police found an illegal bitcoin farm on the premises of the railway enterprise in Ternopil, according to a statement the railway company published on its website on Nov. 15.
The premises were packed with computers run by Ukrzaliznytsya’s employees, creating hefty electricity bills that the company had to pay.
“We have revealed over 100 units of computer hardware, which were generating bitcoins,” Oleh Nazaruk, chief of Ukrzaliznytsya’s economic and IT security department, said in a company statement.
While Ukrainian law stipulates that only the central bank can issue currency, the laws do not prohibit cryptocurrencies, which are popularity in Ukraine both as currency and as an asset. One bitcoin costs $8,600.
This isn’t the first case of shady cryptocurrency mining at the expense of a state-owned enterprise. In August 2018, the SBU arrested employees at a nuclear power plant in Yuzhnoukrainsk – a city about 300 kilometers south of Kyiv — who were illegally mining cryptocurrency using the plant’s electricity.
Then in 2017, the police and the SBU revealed a cryptocurrency farm consisting of 200 computers in an unused pool on the premises of the Paton Electric Welding Institute. Law enforcement seized the equipment and opened a criminal case against those suspected of operating the crypto mining farm.
