School Officials Charged in Crypto Mining Scam

School Officials from Patterson Joint Unified School District have been charged for allegedly running a cryptocurrency mining operation.

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has charged two school officials of the Patterson Joint Unified School District with operating a cryptocurrency mining operation on the premises of the district’s ten schools, utilizing school resources and driving up the costs of power while doing so.

In a recent statement, the Department of Justice (DOJ) asserted that the school officials Jeffrey Menge, assistant superintendent and chief business officer of Patterson Joint Unified School District and Eric Drabert, director of information technology for the school district collaborated to run a cryptocurrency mining farm and then pocketed the proceeds from their efforts.

“They purchased high-end graphics cards and used those cards, together with other school district property and electricity, to operate a cryptocurrency mining” farm at the school district.”

However, the statement did not clarify how many schools in the district were used for the cryptocurrency mining operation by the school officials. Ten schools serve around 6,200 kids in the operation. Moreover, the operation did not publicly disclose the type of cryptocurrency mined bu the school officials.

Miners frequently mine Bitcoin, Monero, Ravencoin (RVN), and Dogecoin (DOGE) among other cryptocurrencies. According to the most recent information provided by CoinGecko, the amount of electricity required to mine a single bitcoin by a single miner is approximately 266,000 kilowatt hours.

To accomplish this task, miners would need to use approximately 143 kWh of electricity per month, which would take around seven years from now.

In addition to other alleged fraudulent activities, the Department of Justice asserted that Menge took between one million and one and a half million dollars, while Drabert stole between two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

This comes from a recent crackdown on cryptocurrency miners by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), part of an attempt to reduce energy waste nationwide.

The Department of Energy (DOE) of the United States of America said on February 1 that cryptocurrency miners must report their energy consumption for the next six months.

This action is a response to worries about the recent jump in Bitcoin values, which has increased the number of cryptocurrency mining activities.

The United States Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced just one day before this that it will publish a survey to evaluate the electricity usage of local cryptocurrency mining companies beginning next week.

Miners will be “required to respond with details related to their energy use,” according to the EIA. It is not simply a problem that exists within the United States of America.

To curb excessive electricity usage, regulators worldwide are now taking measures. It was reported in December 2023 that Indonesian police officials had shut down ten Bitcoin mining companies, accusing the organizers of stealing electricity worth approximately one million dollars.