Former Employee Guilty of Stealing Bitcoin from Mining Company Network

A former employee of a Bitcoin mining company in Niagara Falls, New York has been found guilty of unauthorized access to the company's computer network and theft of cryptocurrency.

The defendant, 40-year-old Christopher Renkin from Washington State, was employed at the company while he committed the crime. He manually rebooted around 100 computers in July 2021 and redirected their computing power to a mining pool under his control.

This resulted in approximately 1.0668 BTC being mined and sent to cryptocurrency wallets owned by Renkin, which at the time was worth over $53,000.

The prosecution charged Renkin with transmitting programs or code to protected computers with the intent to cause harm, an offense carrying a penalty of up to one year in prison and a fine of up to $100,000.