A wave of equipment theft from a mining farm swept across Iceland

Mining-farm company Genesis Mining in Iceland

In December and January, hundreds of pieces of equipment that were used for mining cryptocurrencies were stolen from data centers in Iceland. According to the police, three thefts occurred in December 2017, and one in January 2018. This is a series of robberies unprecedented in scale and audacity, the likes of which have not yet been in the history of the country, law enforcement officials said. The authorities did not make a public announcement immediately after the events, hoping to track down the robbers.

In the case of arrested 11 people, including the security guard of one of the data centers, but to find the stolen equipment has not yet succeeded.

As a result of the first December robberies , 600 video cards, 100 power supplies, 100 motherboards, 100 memory drives and 100 CPUs disappeared. The cost of all equipment stolen in December-January is estimated at more than 200 million kroons (approximately $ 1.99 million at the current exchange rate).

On Friday, March 2, 2018, the District Court of Reykjanes (a region in the south-west of the island) for the first time considered the cases of detained suspects and decided to keep two of them in custody. A thorough review of the case is scheduled for a later date. While investigating authorities are working.

“This is a grand theft on an unprecedented scale,” said Olafur Helgi Kjartansson, police commissioner on the Reykjanes peninsula, where two robberies occurred. “Everything points to the involvement of well-organized crime in them.”

Three robberies occurred from December 5, 2017 to January 16, 2018 in the data centers of Reykjanesbair and Borgarbigda, writes the Icelandic edition Visir . The first of these areas is on Reykjanes Peninsula, and the second is also in the western part of the country, not far away.

In small Iceland, with a population of only 332,500 people, there are many data centers of international operators. This is due to the low cost of electricity due to the large number of renewable sources. These are mainly geothermal sources (27%) and hydropower (73%), which almost completely cover the needs of the country. Another important factor is the cold climate throughout the year , reducing the cost of cooling data centers. There is so much cheap energy here that the Icelandic government announced a large-scale program to build aluminum smelters to convert a huge excess of electricity somewhere. Negotiations are underway to lay a high-voltage power line to the UK in order to drain excess capacity there. And the third trump card of Iceland is one of the lowest corporate tax rates in Europe (20% rate). Plus huge free territories and highly educated labor: Iceland is one of the first places on the continent according to this indicator.

Due to the climate, excess electricity and low taxes, many international operators are now building data centers in Iceland. Operators of mining farms, who maynate themselves or rent computing resources for rent to other miners, also pulled up here. The same company Genesis Mining claims that their Enigma farm in Iceland is the largest Ethereum mining company in the world.

It is said that in recent months, especially many mining farms have opened in Iceland. It is probably difficult to find a region with cheaper electricity in Europe. The search query "the cost of electricity in Iceland" is one of the most popular in the auto-completion of the phrase "the cost of electricity" in Google.



The authorities expect that during 2018, mining cryptocurrency in Iceland will consume more energy than electricity for residential buildings . According to the forecast, the total capacity of Icelandic mining farms exceeds 100 MW.

Mineramsky boom was in the hands of robbers.

The beauty of mining equipment theft is that it does not need to be sold. For an anonymous receipt of money, you can simply use the video card for their intended purpose, that is, for mining cryptocurrencies. In other words, stealing video cards from a farm or data center is about theft of money from a bank. Or you can compare it with the theft of a machine for printing banknotes of the Moscow printing house of Goznak.

Now the police of Iceland is trying to calculate the thieves, tracking energy consumption in all regions of the country. She hopes that the criminals will connect the video card to the electrical grid and will reveal the place of their underground mining. All Internet providers and grid operators were asked to report abnormal activity.