Red Hot Cyber
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Redazione RHC : 8 December 2025 20:40
Thieves usually target tangible assets: cash or non-cash, jewelry, cars. But with cryptocurrencies, things are much stranger.
Malaysian police are hunting down around 14,000 illegal Bitcoin mining companies that have stolen approximately $1.1 billion in electricity from the country’s grid over the past five years.
To detect these underground mining operations, law enforcement agencies are forced to deploy drones and use handheld sensors to detect anomalous energy consumption . The result is a virtual cat-and-mouse game of espionage , clearly demonstrating how profitable cryptocurrency mining can be when someone else pays for the electricity.
Bitcoin’s price surged this year, reaching a new all-time high of over $126,000 in October . Since then, the price has plummeted, but mining the coin, now costly due to power costs, has forced miners to connect to the network, illegally stealing electricity.
For Malaysia, it’s not just a matter of economic losses. In addition to losses of over $1 billion for the state-owned power company Tenaga Nasional , bitcoin factories are straining the power grid and potentially physically damaging infrastructure.
“It’s not just theft anymore,” Akmal Nasir, Malaysia’s Deputy Minister of Energy Transition and Water Resources and head of a task force to combat illegal bitcoin mining, told Bloomberg . “These operations can damage our equipment. This is becoming a systemic threat.”
Similar stories aren’t limited to Malaysia. In Iran, last year’s repeated power outages sparked debate over the role of illegal Bitcoin mining. In Kuwait, authorities also cracked down on cryptocurrency miners this year, following a severe energy crisis and blackouts.
Globally, Bitcoin mining consumes colossal amounts of energy, comparable to that of entire countries. Yet, the United States remains the leading mining hub: according to a recent report from the University of Cambridge, it accounts for over 75% of all mining activity . This is despite other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum, having already switched to alternative transaction confirmation mechanisms that drastically reduce energy consumption.
Against this backdrop, illegal mining is proliferating in Malaysia. Abandoned shopping malls and industrial areas are being rented out and transformed into cryptocurrency mines.
Official miners must pay for electricity and taxes. But for many, it’s more profitable to take the risk and connect to the grid illegally: stolen energy significantly reduces costs and increases the chances of remaining profitable, even in the event of significant exchange rate fluctuations.
“Even if mining were organized according to all the rules, the problem remains the extreme volatility of the market itself,” says Nasir. “I don’t see a single legal mining operation that can be considered truly successful.”
According to the deputy minister, illegal farms operate like veritable criminal organizations. “There’s a syndicate behind them,” he noted. “They have their own well-established operational mechanisms.”
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