A man from Leicestershire UK was jailed today for stealing electricity to support his BTC mining operations that ran in two separate commercial hubs. The 40-year old Sanjay Singh bypassed electricity from both a nightclub in Loughborough and from electricity meters in Coalville.
The UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) revealed that the perp ran some 200 separate devices that got electrically supplied from the unmetered fuse boxes. The cost of all the stolen electricity has been calculated to be in the tens of thousands of pounds. The authorities discovered Singh bypassing schemes later in the investigation when a substation fault resulted in an overload of the electrical systems being used by the perp.
The UK citizen was charged with two counts of abstracting electricity. He was sent to trial at Leicester Crown Court, and after pleading guilty was sentenced to prison for a period of 13 months and 2 weeks.
The Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor at CPS East Midlands, Andrew Baxter, revealed that the case with Sanjay Singh is highly uncommon, considering the fact that BTC mining is a legal undertaking in the UK. The arrestee was acting “out of greed” and because of his he was unable to meet the electricity costs of his mining operation. Baxter comments that “The overwhelming majority of times we see offenses of abstracting electricity, they are to support other criminal activities such as growing cannabis“.
Meanwhile as reported by FinanceMagnates, the US is now ahead of China in terms of Bitcoin mining.
