A 33 year-old IT contractor from Killara in New South Wales took advantage of his position as an Australian government employee, to modify government computer systems to mine cryptocurrency for his own gain.
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) alleged that the person is guilty with two charges: unauthorized modification of data to cause impairment, and unauthorized modification of restricted data.
These charges carry maximum penalties of 10 and two years imprisonment, respectively.
“Australian taxpayers put their trust in public officials to perform vital roles for our community with the utmost integrity,” said Acting Commander Chris Goldsmid. “Any alleged criminal conduct which betrays this trust for personal gain will be investigated and prosecute.”
Goldsmid continued by describing the alleged crime by this civil servant as "very serious."
According to AFP's report, the mining operation has earned the person more than AU$9,000 ($6,000).
The news marks just another instance of government employees who have got in trouble for mining cryptocurrencies using government-owned hardware to benefit oneself.
Some examples include when a former employee of the Federal Reserve Board of Directors was fined $5,000 and put on probation after being caught mining Bitcoins on a server owned by the U.S. central bank.
Then there was the instance where nuclear scientists at a Russian weapons research facility were charged for the same crime, and another was in when two school principals in China were caught stealing power from their institution to mine the Ethereum cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency mining is seen as a profitable business. But since the number of miners increase, so do the hash rate (speed of processing transactions). This makes mining increasingly difficult.
When cryptocurrency was first getting traction, miners can use their home computers to mine cryptocurrencies with relative ease. Using commercial-grade CPUs, miners can earn decent earnings without having to pay a lot for energy consumption.
But as mining becomes increasingly difficult, miners can no longer depend on CPUs, or even GPUs of PCs. Here, miners have to use specialized hardware, like the ASIC, which has a significantly higher hash rate than CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs.
This is why people with no proper equipment, but still want to mine cryptocurrency, steal electricity to run mining equipment.
Others, use the hardware where they work, so they don't have to pay for anything.