Thieves steal 600 powerful mining PCs in Icelandic “Big Bitcoin Heist”

Theives steal 600 powerful mining PCs in Icelandic

Thieves steal 600 powerful mining PCs in Icelandic “Big Bitcoin Heist”

Over the past few months, PC hardware has been in high demand due to the recent Cryptocurrency mining craze, especially when it comes to GPUs. This crypto craze has lead to massive PC mining operations starting up across the world, especially in regions where electricity is cheap and reliant on affordable renewable energy sources.  

Iceland is a good example of this, where the nation’s power is primarily taken from Geothermal or hydroelectric sources, making electricity extremely cheap and mining a lot more profitable.   

The high demand for PC hardware and the profitability of cryptocurrency mining has significantly increased the pricing of graphics cards worldwide, making mining farms a huge target for criminals, as each mining PC could operate with 6 or more graphics cards each. 

In December and January, four major burglaries have taken place in Iceland, with around 600 mining PCs being stolen alongside a large amount of standalone hardware. Olafur Helgi Kjartansson, the police commissioner on the southwestern Reykjanes peninsula, an area where two of these four heists took place, stated that “This is a grand theft on a scale unseen before” and that “everything points to this being a highly organised crime.” 

 
 
Theives steal 600 powerful mining PCs in Icelandic
So far eleven people have been arrested in Iceland, though none of the stolen PCs/hardware been found. Right now the hardware in question is said to be worth almost $2 million, though the thieves don’t even need to sell it to make money, given their usefulness for mining difficult to trace cryptocurrencies. At this time Police are keeping a close eye on the power grid in case there have been major usage spikes, which could be used to trace the locations of the PCs in question. 

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