Former US School Employee Racked Up US$17000 With Secret Cryptomining Farm

Ever since the Ethereum Merge last year, cryptocurrency and the resources needed to mine the digital currency haven’t been as profitable as they were prior. Unless, of course, you manage to get someone to foot the gargantuan electricity bill that is the byproduct of the process. In fact, that’s what one person in the US did, albeit without the say-so of the entity.

Here’s the rundown: back in 2021, the US public school of Cohasset, located in Massachusetts, discovered an illegal cryptomining farm within its grounds. As per the official reports, the mining farm was built by Nadeam Nahas, a former employee who used to work at the school. Bitten by the resurgence in cryptocurrency, Nahas clearly wanted to make his fortune while he still could, but it was evident that he didn’t want to pay the hefty utiilities bill that would come with the act.

Still hellbent on running his cryptomining operation, Nahas decided that he would set up his farm on school grounds. That’s where he found a nice secluded crawlspace, situated within the school’s boiler room. In total, that space played house to, from what we can see, 11 Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), purely dedicated to mining.

Nahas would have gotten away with his sideline cryptomining gig, had it not been discovered by the school’s facilities director during a routine inspection. During said inspection, the director had found unexplained duct work, wiring, and all the earlier mentioned ASICs that clearly didn’t belong in the boiler room, let alone the school. At that point, an investigation was launched and Nahas was fingered as the culprit soon after.

From setup to the point that it was discovered, Nahas’ cryptomining farm had been operational for a period of eight months and was running around the clock with an average power consumption between 1200W and 2600W per miner. To put that into financial terms, Nahas basically had the school pay a total of US$17500 (~RM78373), while he raked in all the profits.

Nahas resigned from his position as the Assistant Facilities Director of the Cohasset public school, and pleaded not guilty to the charges of stealing power of the school grid, in order to run his illegal cryptomining farm.

(Source: WCVB, Techspot)