A former employee of a high school in Cohasset, Massachusetts, has recently been arrested for creating an illegal cryptocurrency mining scheme below the school’s floor. The man hooked up a few PCs in the school’s crawl space and stole electricity to mine Bitcoin for free.

Bitcoin mining scams are fairly popular these days. Last year, a prominent Call of Duty: Warzone cheat maker was accused of using the computers of their users to stealthily mine Bitcoin. Due to how intensive PC gaming is in high settings, most cheaters did not realize that their rigs were actually being used to mine cryptocurrencies, which helped to cloak the scam before evidence surfaced online.

Now, Nadeam Nahas, who worked as the facilities director in a small high school located in a city just around 10 miles from Boston, is facing charges of fraudulent electricity use and vandalism for his illegal crypto operation. His plan involved using his position to hide the operation below the school’s floor. The plan went sour when a routine inspection showed that several electrical wires seemed out of place. By investigating further, the school’s employees found computers with powerful GPUs hidden in the crawl space.

The man, who pleaded not guilty to the accusations in court, despite talking all the time about crypto on Twitter, is being accused of running an illegal operation between April and December 2021. During this time, he nicked around $17,500 in electricity. While the damage was significant to a small school’s electric bill, this was far from a major 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.

While this case is notorious for the novelty of hiding computers underground and the illegality of the situation, people trying to gain money with blockchain technology in dubious ways is an unfortunate reality in the gaming industry. Recently, Sony stated that it wanted to rent non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to PlayStation 5 players. One of the tech giant’s patents suggested that the goal was to rent NFTs that depicted artwork from popular games and that could be displayed during streams. When the rental time was over, the assets would return to Sony’s possession. The move did not gather any sympathy at the same, as the general perception of NFTs in the gaming community is often very negative. However, Sony does not seem to have abandoned the idea.

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Source: BBC News