Thieves steal 600 powerful bitcoin-mining computers in huge heist
In Iceland, police are hoping a power surge will lead them to the criminals' stash.
600 powerful servers specifically designed to mine bitcoin. (What is bitcoin? Here's everything you need to know.) Plus 600 graphics cards, 100 processors, 100 power supplies, 100 motherboards and 100 sets of computer memory.
According to The Associated Press and Visir, those are the items a coordinated group of Icelandic thieves has stolen. And though 11 people have reportedly been arrested and at least two are still in custody, none of the stolen computers have yet been found by police.
The thefts, which occured between late December and early January, were reportedly captured on surveillance cameras by Advania, the server company hit by two of the three thefts. (The graphics cards, processors and so on were allegedly stolen from a home.) Advania had been offering its customers access to bitcoin-mining rigs, and it sounds like those were the type that were stolen. The Associated Press reports that the stolen computers are worth nearly $2 million.
"This is a grand theft on a scale unseen before," Police Commissioner Olafur Helgi Kjartansson said, according to the AP. "Everything points to this being a highly organized crime."
The AP reports that police are tracking energy consumption across Iceland in case the thieves turn on their new computers and place a strain on the grid, since that could potentially lead them back to the stolen computers' location.
Neither Iceland's Ministry of Justice nor Kjartansson immediately replied to a CNET request for comment.
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