The police have arrested a former Massachusetts state facility worker for allegedly stealing electricity worth $17,492.57 to run an illegal crypto-mining operation.
Nadeem Nahas, who used to work for Cohasset town’s facilities department, reportedly set up a secret crypto-mining facility in the crawl space of Cohasset High School.
The local police were alerted to the operation in December 2021 after the high school’s facilities director noticed strange computers and wiring in the crawl space. After a three-month investigation, the police discovered 11 mining computers allegedly kept by Nahas.
Nahas resigned from his position in the Cohasset facilities department in March, and the matter has been under investigation since December 2021.
The accused failed to appear for a hearing in court, prompting the judge to issue a default warrant for his arrest.
Running a crypto-mining operation with stolen electricity is not uncommon, as evidenced by the crackdown on several illegal Bitcoin miners in Malaysia in July 2021. The authorities seized and destroyed over $1.2 million worth of Bitcoin mining rigs in the process.
