Two school principals in Hunan province, China, have gotten themselves into hot water for mining Ethereum at work.
Lei Hua, Principal of the Puman Middle School in Chenzhou, Hunan convinced his wife that mining Ethereum might be a good way to earn some extra income, then put 7 machines to work at school.
Lei was put on to the benefits of crypto mining by a cousin, prompting him to spend 10,000 yuan on equipment, one machine followed later by another 6 which he ran round the clock in one of the school’s classrooms. The only problem being between June and November last year he used over $2K of the school’s electricity.
So profitable were the school principal’s extracurricular activities that his vice- principal decided to join him. The activities were only tumbled when teaching staff observed unusual levels of noise emanating from the schools’ physics’ lab which clearly couldn’t have been caused by lessons, although the 24 whirring was originally put down to the school’s air conditioning. This noise was emanating from an extra two machines set up there by vice-principle Wang, also purchased from the principal’s cousin.
Once the nine machines were discovered by authorities and duo’s earnings were seized, the school returned to its main function; educating the children. The principal was removed from office but his junior managed to retain his job with an official warning.
Illegal mining at work does happen, albeit not frequently. Power theft, however, is a far more frequent activity. Russian miners made the news earlier this year when more than 6,000 pieces of mining equipment were found at the site of an abandoned rubber factory in Orenburg, 1,478 kilometers southeast of Moscow near the Russian border with Kazakhstan.
Russian ministry of internal affairs spokesperson, Irina Volk, stated that the miners, two former factory employees, had stolen 8 million kW/h of electricity estimated to cost 60 million Russian rubles (RUB, approximately USD 968,000 at time of writing). Media reports suggest that despite rumors of the mining farm’s existence since March, police declined to comment if they had any knowledge of illegal activities taking place.
Also, earlier this year, Russian security officers arrested scientists at a top-secret warhead facility in Sarov, 240 miles east of Moscow. Several scientists had tried to use one of Russia’s most powerful supercomputers to mine Bitcoin.
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