According to police estimates, a total of up to 600 cryptocurrency mining rigs have fallen victim to thieves in a series of organised thefts in Iceland over the past few months.
According to police estimates, a total of up to 600 cryptocurrency mining rigs have fallen victim to thieves in a series of organised thefts in Iceland over the past few months.
“We are dealing with theft on a scale never seen before,” says Olafur Helgi Kjartansson, police commissioner for Reykjanes, the southwestern cape of the island, where two of the four incidents of this kind have occurred. Kjartansson adds
“everything indicates that we are dealing with a highly organized crime.”
In connection with the case, the police have already arrested 11 people. Two of them are still in custody. The total losses were estimated at almost 2 million dollars.
Although the thefts occurred in December and January last year, police have only now made the information public for the sake of the ongoing investigation. Local electricity consumption levels are still being monitored, and electricity and internet service providers are asked to report any “suspicious activity” that could lead local law enforcement to the thieves.
Iceland’s specific geographic location and the access to relatively cheap geothermal and hydroelectric energy that the island provides have made it a paradise for large mining farms. The number of these has been growing in Iceland at an exponential rate in recent times.
As a result of what we have also written about, the total electricity consumption by bitcoin mines located in Iceland will most likely exceed the corresponding demand of all households there this year.
The steady increase in the price of cryptocurrencies that we have been dealing with in recent years has made mining equipment an attractive target for potential thieves. Similar events to those in Iceland have also recently occurred in Malaysia – last week, around 60 devices of this type were stolen there. In 2016, a total of 165 miners were stolen from the BTCS mine in the US state of North Carolina.
