- Nadeam Nahas pleaded not guilty in Quincy District Court on Friday
- Police were tipped off when wiring, duct tape and computers were out-of-place
- Eleven computers and a cooling system were found in the school’s crawl space
A Massachusetts man is facing charges of allegedly running a secret cryptocurrency mining operation out of a crawlspace at a middle school and using nearly $18,000-worth of their electricity.
Nadeam Nahas pled not guilty when he appeared in Quincy District Court on Friday, one day after he failed to appear for a scheduled arraignment and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Nahas, who worked as an assistant facilities director for the town of Cohasset, is accused of connecting the school’s electrical system to help run the illegal scheme that took place for nearly nine-months April through December 2021.
Police were tipped off when the director of facilities for the Cohasset Middle/High School noticed out-of-place electrical wires, computers and temporary ductwork found in a crawlspace near the school’s boiler room.
Cops called in the town’s IT director and together they discovered a secret cryptocurrency mining operation consisting of eleven powerful computers and a cooling system.
Things escalated further in the small-town case when the Coast Guard Investigative Service and the Department of Homeland Security were drafted in to find the culprit. After a three-month investigation, Nahas was identified as the suspect and he resigned from his job in March 2022.
The process of ‘mining’ cryptocurrency used computers to verify transactions by solving complex equations, requiring a ‘considerable amount of electricity, according to The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
As of August 2022, published estimates of the total global electricity usage for crypto-assets are 120 to 240 billion kilowatt-hours per year, a range that exceeds the total annual electricity usage of many individual countries, such as Argentina or Australia, the OSTP states.
According to the University of Cambridge, bitcoin (which is just one of many cryptocurrencies) requires roughly 14 gigawatts of electricity daily.
According to the Department of Energy, the daily energy needs of bitcoin would require approximately 43 million solar panels or 4,662 utility-scale wind turbines.
Nahas is one of many accused of stealing electricity to power cryptocurrency mining operation.
In 2021, Malaysia seized 1,720 bitcoin mining machines during an electricity theft crackdown, and arrested more than 600 people for stealing electricity to mine cryptocurrency over the past two years, Crypto News reported.
A kennel owner in China was arrested in 2020 for stealing power to run a bitcoin mining farm.
Two brothers were arrested in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 2016 for stealing electricity to mine bitcoin and grow cannabis, the new outlet said.
