Police dismantle illegal cryptomining ring enslaving thousands of PS4 consoles and GPUs

In the city of Vinnytsia, a group of crypto-miners has been accused of “theft of water, electricity or thermal energy through its unauthorized use”, by the SBU. According to the report, “electricity meters that did not show actual power consumption” were used to steal more than $ 259,000 of electricity per month for the crypto farm. After the opening of these procedures, the security service was then able to seize interesting material.

Of course, miners used over 500 graphics cards for their business, as is the standard for mining, and up to 3,800 PlayStation 4 consoles were also seized. In the images, it appears that all of these consoles were networked and potentially used for cryptocurrency mining. While using the original PS4 at 1.84 teraflops probably wouldn’t be worth it, the PS4 Pro at 4.2 teraflops is within range of the AMD Radeon RX 570 or RX 580, depending on bandwidth and memory speed, and could be good for Ethereum mining.

Either way, using a GPU is always more efficient for mining cryptocurrency, but they’re hard to come by right now, so a console is a better option than nothing. Also, efficiency may not have been the primary concern, as power was in fact being stolen. Either way, things are pretty bleak now for this illegal mining company.