A former employee of a high school in Cohasset, Massachusetts has recently been arrested for setting up an illegal cryptocurrency mining scheme under the school floor. The man wired up some PCs in the school’s crawl space and stole electricity to mine Bitcoin for free.
Bitcoin mining scams are quite popular these days. Last year, a standout Call of Duty: Warzone the cheater was accused of using the computers of his users to exfiltrate Bitcoin. Due to how intensive PC gaming is in high settings, most cheaters didn’t realize their rigs were actually being used to mine cryptocurrencies, helping to hide the scam until evidence surfaced online.
Now Nadeam Nahas, who worked as facilities director at a small high school located in a town only about 10 miles from Boston, is facing charges of fraudulent use of electricity and vandalism for his illegal crypto operation. His plan involved using his position to hide the operation beneath the school floor. The plan went sour when a routine check showed that several electrical wires seemed out of place. Investigating further, school staff found computers with powerful GPUs hidden in the crawl space.
The man, who pleaded not guilty to the charges in court despite constantly talking about crypto on Twitter, is accused of running an illegal operation between April and December 2021. During this time, he raked in around 17,500 dollars in electricity. Although the damage was significant to a small school’s electricity bill, this was far from a large operation, as Nahas only had 11 PCs running the mining software. Compared to a company that bought 18,000 Nvidia GPUs for Bitcoin mining around the same time as his scheme, that’s peanuts.
Although this case is notorious for the novelty of hiding computers underground and the illegality of the situation, people trying to make money with blockchain technology in questionable ways is an unfortunate reality in the gaming industry. Recently, Sony stated that they wanted to rent out non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to PlayStation 5 players. One of the tech giant’s patents suggested the goal was to rent NFTs that depicted artwork from popular games and could be displayed during streams. Once the lease term was over, the assets would revert to Sony’s ownership. At the same time, the move did not garner any sympathy, as the general perception of NFTs in the gaming community is often very negative. However, Sony doesn’t seem to have abandoned the idea.
Source: BBC News
