Employees of the Irkutsk Electric Grid Company, in collaboration with law enforcement, discovered an illegal mining farm with over 130 installations in the workers’ settlement of Markova, according to SIA.
A local resident set up containers and cabins with equipment on four plots of land. She illegally connected to an overhead power line and ran a cable to a transformer substation.
The combined power of the miners exceeded 2 MW, equivalent to approximately 150 private homes. Experts estimated the damage from the illegal crypto farm’s activities at over 12 million rubles.
Transport was required to remove the confiscated ASIC miners.
“Currently, police are conducting activities aimed at establishing all the circumstances of the incident. Following the investigation, the actions of the ‘grey miners’ will be legally assessed in conjunction with the prosecutor’s office under current legislation,” clarified the press service of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Irkutsk Region.
According to SIA, since the beginning of the year, law enforcement and other services have managed to reduce the load on the region’s power system by 300 MW by cracking down on illegal mining. For instance, one entrepreneur mined cryptocurrency in the basement of an apartment building in the Kuybyshevsky district of Irkutsk. In the same Markovsky municipal area, an individual placed 96 ASIC miners on their plot.
Experts have estimated the damage in Russia from electricity theft by ‘grey’ miners at 10 billion rubles annually.