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Ukrainian law enforcement shut down a “major” mining farm, the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) said Thursday.
According to an official report, the miners occupied a utility room at the local electricity provider in the town of Vinnitsa southwest of Kyiv and illegally plugged into its power grid. “Entire blocks of Vinnitsa could have been left without power,” the SSU said.
The law officers seized 5,000 units of hardware including “3,800 Playstations, 500 GPUs, 50 CPUs, documents, note pads, phones and flash drives,” according to the report. Authorities are now trying to identify the people involved with the mining farm, possibly including the staff of the electricity provider, Vinnytsiaoblenergo.
Vinnytsiaoblenergo may have lost as much as $250,000 a month, the investigators said.
Ukrainian law enforcement officials discover illegal mining farms from time to time, raiding venues with unauthorized access to the electricity grid. Earlier in July, the SSU shut down a smaller farm in Chernihiv oblast containing 150 ASICs, Forklog reported.
Ukraine is about to pass its first crypto regulation, with the Draft Bill on Virtual Assets proceeding through parliament. The country’s central bank has been exploring the prospects of issuing a Ukrainian hryvnia-backed CDBC, and earlier this month the future CBDC was included in the national regulation for payment systems.
