UK Police Stumble Upon Bitcoin Mine While Looking For Cannabis Farm (bbc.com) 68
phalse phace shares a report from the BBC: A suspected Bitcoin "mining" operation illegally stealing electricity has been found by police who were searching for a cannabis farm. Officers had been tipped off about the site on the Great Bridge Industrial Estate, Sandwell, and raided it on May 18, West Midlands Police said. Instead of cannabis plants they found a bank of about 100 computer units. The force said the cryptocurrency "mine" had effectively stolen thousands of pounds of electricity. Inquiries with network operator Western Power Distribution found an illegal connection to the electricity supply.
Detectives said they were tipped off about lots of people visiting the unit throughout the day and a police drone picked up a lot of heat coming from the building. Sgt Jennifer Griffin said, given the signs, they had expected to find a cannabis farm. "It had all the hallmarks of a cannabis cultivation set-up and I believe it is only the second such crypto mine we have encountered in the West Midlands," she said. The computer equipment has been seized but no arrests have been made, the force said.
Detectives said they were tipped off about lots of people visiting the unit throughout the day and a police drone picked up a lot of heat coming from the building. Sgt Jennifer Griffin said, given the signs, they had expected to find a cannabis farm. "It had all the hallmarks of a cannabis cultivation set-up and I believe it is only the second such crypto mine we have encountered in the West Midlands," she said. The computer equipment has been seized but no arrests have been made, the force said.
Re:Why seize the computer equipment? (Score:5, Informative)
They were stealing electricity, probably by bypassing the power meter, though the next step is probably to root the power company billing system.
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every time I buy anything I'm worried if Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is somehow reaping a reward.
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The power companies do easily detect this though if there's a high power draw. They'll notice something funny in the neighborhood and send trucks out to look at the meters discretely. Then there are the people who think you just put giant magnets on the meters not realizing that it doesn't work on the newer solid state meters. Or that the utilities can just look over your fence to figure out what you're doing even if you don't let them in your yard.
Pot grow houses are always temporary, it's a part of the
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A classic one with sensors is to detect no signal at all and mark the sensor as non-functional. I wonder if the miners in this case found a way to simulate normal demand?
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No, that's not the case. Here's a picture of a typical UK installation:
http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/inde... [diyfaq.org.uk]
The unit on the right holds the main fuse, and is connected by tails to the meter. As you can see, there's nothing stopping you from breaking the meter seal and connecting directly into the tails - bypassing the meter, but not the fuse. Of course this will be quite obvious if someone looks, and even if you put it back before the meter reader visits the broken seal is likely to prompt some questions.
If yo
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Indeed... seizing the equipment is not enough; they need to figure out who was running it and seize the value of any mined coins as well.
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Since when is mining bitcoin worthy of having your computers seized by the police?
When you are stealing electricity for them and they are evidence in the case.
Re:Why seize the computer equipment? (Score:4, Informative)
Theft of electricity is the crime here. Mining bitcoins is perfectly legal in England, though with the price of electricity here, it is probably not very profitable if you have to pay for it.
"thousands of pounds of electricity" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"thousands of pounds of electricity" (Score:5, Funny)
Almost a tonne.
Whats that in electron-volts?
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Since this is the UK, it's more important to know the BTUs.
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Approximately 1 gram for 1 billion joules at 1V, so yes it's rather a lot.
This is common place (Score:3)
Bitcoin mining on rootkit installed systems, and with stolen AWS credentials, is startlingly commonplace, It's not that AWS particularly encourages theft of credentials, but the poor security in far too many companies encourages it. It's particularly popular to activate from poorly secured administrative systems used for Kubernetes and Harness based deployments, which can easily set up entire VPC's that are isolated from casual access by the owners of the original account. It takes careful monitoring of bills and of active resources to even notice such abuse.
Bitcoin mining better than grow op (Score:2)
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what if the GPUs are stolen too? Then would you complain?
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No GPUs unless they were mining something like Ether not bitcoin... Bitcoin miners use ASICs; GPUs simply don't have enough hashrate to do anything useful with on that blockchain.
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The pictures I saw on another site liked like ASICs.
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I'd rather have illegal bitcoin miners instead of illegal grow op. The grow ops tend to cause black mold and water damage while the mining operation should leave major headaches for the property owner / other residents.
The problem is that it's illegal, if you could grow it in a proper facility then people would do that.
Power Intensive Cannibas Farm (Score:1)
Why on earth would anyone growing cannabis still be using power-intensive incandescent bulbs?
Is there really any reason not to have switched to LED bulbs sometime during the last ten years? And if no one is still using incandescent bulbs, why are the police looking for them?
And what kind of fool would steal thousands of pounds of power and not expect the power company to notice, thereby disrupting one's profitable mining operation?
I expect there's more to the story than appears here.
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The stolen energy is a small part of the overall consumption for an area. Probably losses due to poor insulation are greater than losses from theft. The heat emitted by growers and crypto miners can be detected by helicopter mounted infrared cameras and often leads the police to the offender.
Now, how to hide waste heat...
Re:Power Intensive Cannibas Farm (Score:4, Interesting)
The point here is that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Lighting intensity, even with LED light sources, can be between 35 and 50 watts per square foot [urbanorganicyield.com]. All of that ends up as heat, regardless of luminous efficiency. Throw a 1500w space heater into a 30 square foot room (5.5 ft x 5.5 ft), run it full blast, and tell me that the room won't show up on a FLIR camera. Changing it to 1500w of LEDs changes nothing.
Name them. Then explain how they don't require permitting, hazardous materials disclosures, and a host of other municipal records that will be associated with those operations but not with a fly-by-night grow operation (or cryptocurrency mining operation).
Your unwarranted confidence [wsj.com] in the ability of utilities to monitor their distribution lines is astonishing.
Self-evidently not, since it occurred here and was detected by thermal cameras, not by inspection or metering issues. Your belief that this is misinformation disregards reality [safeelectricity.org], rather than serving as evidence of such misinformation.
Was it? How long was this operating running? How many more are there that are undetected? Prove your premise, don't merely assume it.
If we assume that each of the 100 units was driving only 1 250W video card, that's 25 kW*h per hour, or more like 3600 pounds per month. Scale up from there. The article wrote thousands of pounds, not one thousand pounds.
Fertilizing, ventilation, maintenance, ensuring that both operations don't cook from overheating. You've never run either type of operation so you're simply arguing from ignorance.
How many personal vehicles cycle through your light industrial building on irregular schedules for what sounds like short periods of time? Because where I live, employees show up in the morning, leave for lunch, return from lunch, and leave in the early evening. They don't pop in and out like it's an Uber garage.
But by all means, you've cracked the case of the police lying about what they found and how they found it. Of course you haven't explained how or why, but since our user ID isn't Poirot, we should just let that slide.
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Your unwarranted confidence [wsj.com] in the ability of utilities to monitor their distribution lines is astonishing.
Not even in Thailand a utility would miss a current thief. And in Germany you would not last 3 or 4 month with such a scheme.
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So the one running for two years [financemagnates.com] was a fluke?
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So the one running for two years was a fluke?
Yes it was.
Police discovered a mining operation consisting of at least 49 computers located at PGH Elektro, a former electrical services company.
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But you claimed that it would be detected within 3-4 months due to crack German current monitoring.
What does that have to do with it? They were the ones doing the current monitoring?
I think that your claims have sprung a few leaks, Fritz.
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But you claimed that it would be detected within 3-4 months due to crack German current monitoring.
If an ex power company is stealing power it is obviously an exceptional case.
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35 and 50 watts per square foot
Changing it to 1500w of LEDs changes nothing
You're not comprehending what the different numbers are, presumably because they're both in watts.
The first number is the output. The second number is the input. Incandescent bulbs use around 10x as much power for the same output as LEDs.
To get the same watts per square foot as 1500W of LEDs you'd need 15,000W of incandescents, or around 3500W of florescent.
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Energy in = waste heat out minus any exported work. It's the practical effect of the second law of thermodynamics.
Light output, as in lumens, not heat output, as in watts. The heat output of incandescents and LEDs are the same, only the luminous efficiency increases.
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You're not comprehending what the different numbers are, presumably because they're both in watts.
Energy in = waste heat out minus any exported work. It's the practical effect of the second law of thermodynamics.
you're not listening, and you don't understand the phsyics you're waving your hands at.
When a technology is called more efficient, it means there was less waste heat. In the case of lighting, waste heat dominates the equation.
Jeeubus you're an idiot. If you just said, "golly, I don't understand these numbers" you'd be way less of idiot than you are when you pretend to understand.
And why the fuck do you put all those blockquotes in? Just fucking press the quote button, observe what tags it creates, and
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Considering I prosecute patents for LED technologies and LED lighting power supplies, I beg to differ.
Yes, and the 35-50W/sqft number is already the power input, and therefore approximately the waste heat output, for LED grow light technologies. These lights are not advertised with in
Re: Power Intensive Cannibas Farm (Score:2)
Lighting intensity, even with LED light sources, can be between 35 and 50 watts per square foot. All of that ends up as heat, regardless of luminous efficiency.
Well, that energy which changes the chemical bonds in the plants actually will only turn back into heat when the joint is smoked...
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Now, how to hide waste heat...
By pumping it underground.
The stolen energy is a small part of the overall consumption for an area.
If you believe that, then good luck with your next "power stealing" endeavor.
Probably losses due to poor insulation are greater than losses from theft.
If you believe that, then good luck with your next "power project" in your house.
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You seem not to realize what LED grow lamps consume, 480W per 4 foot square area. Two forty foot lines of those is 9.6 KW
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Re:Power Intensive Cannibas Farm (Score:5, Interesting)
Why on earth would anyone growing cannabis still be using power-intensive incandescent bulbs?
They also serve to keep the crop warm. But also...
Is there really any reason not to have switched to LED bulbs sometime during the last ten years? And if no one is still using incandescent bulbs, why are the police looking for them?
The same reason that they're often found using sodium lamps pilfered from street lights: they steal them. They are criminals after all.
And what kind of fool would steal thousands of pounds of power and not expect the power company to notice, thereby disrupting one's profitable mining operation?
The electricity board would also think it suspicious it if they were paying for that amount of power in a small unit (especially if it ran 24/7), so they might as well steal it. Did I mention that they're criminals?
I expect there's more to the story than appears here.
No, not really.
Disclaimer: I have a relative who accompanies the police on raids solely to safely disconnect the gerry-rigged electricity supplies.
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Did I mention that they're criminals?
BitCoin mining is not a crime/criminal.
The only criminal thing was stealing power.
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Why on earth would anyone growing cannabis still be using power-intensive incandescent bulbs?
As the electricity was stolen, maybe it is some old equipment and they did not care? But you are right, the suspicion by the police was stupid. Not that this is any surprise.
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Re:I seriously doubt they were mining Bitcoin (Score:4, Informative)
Heat? (Score:2)
"a police drone picked up a lot of heat coming from the building."
With LED lighting, is there really enough heat produced to be detectable outside the building?
Re:Heat? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, look up what those LED grow lamps consume. 4 x 10 foot panel of those is 4.8 KW.
Re:Heat? (Score:4, Informative)
To expand upon this: proper LED grow lights are optimized to emit the wavelengths ideal for the plants involved. But you're still fueling extensive chemical operations via photosynthesis.
So you still need "most" of the energy of a full sunlit day. Most lighting inside a house is actually very dim compared to what the sun puts out, it's just that humans(like most animals) have adaptive vision so our eyes work just fine in much dimmer light, and we don't even notice after a moment of adaption.
But plants are trying to grow using that energy, so they need as much of it as they can get. Enter relatively lots of power.
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So you still need "most" of the energy of a full sunlit day. Most lighting inside a house is actually very dim compared to what the sun puts out, it's just that humans(like most animals) have adaptive vision so our eyes work just fine in much dimmer light, and we don't even notice after a moment of adaption.
To put some numbers into this, the sunlight reaching ground has an intensity of about 1 kW/m^2. Of course that includes a lot of spectrum that is not needed for plant growth; on the other hand, even LED lighting is not super efficient. So it's easy to estimate you need a couple of kW of electricity to get the equivalent of a square metre under the sun.
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Light that isn't converted by the plant bounces the grow tent around and is absorbed and turned into heat. It's better than sunlight because almost none of the output starts off as infrared, but conservation of energy is what it is.
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1) Just because it is less heat than other lighting sources doesn't necessarily mean there will be less heat "coming from" the building in the form of infrared radiation from the roof. This is because they likely used less ventilation fans than they would have with other light sources.
2) The plants grow best in a warm environment. Grow operations aren't warm on account of not managing the waste heat from the lights. Typically there is a closed-loop controller connected to both the ventilation fans and a hea
Stollen.... (Score:1)
makes zero sense (Score:2)
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They knew how much electricity was being stolen, and probably someone in the police force is capable of working out how much heat that translates to.
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The police is always backwards and a decade or so behind. It is are not the smartest or "finest" people available that want to do that job. Also, maybe these could have been _stupid_ weed growers using outdated equipment?
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I don't think they were looking for a crypto mine or a grow house.
I think they found a area where a lot of heat was coming out of and though it was a grow house.
People are stupid (Score:2)
And crypto-miners even more so. It has been well known for at least a decade that the police in many countries is looking for places that consume unusually high amounts of electricity to find indoor weed-farms. Stealing the electricity may make this take a but longer to be found, but electricity does not simply vanish from the wires (unlike water, for example, which leaks).