Icelandic police have iced, i mean arrested 11 people in connection with four raids on data centers that targeted cryptocurrency mining equipment.
Starting in December 2017 three data centers were opened and cracked in December. A second raid in a place in January. A total of 600 servers were detained in the raids.
Icelandic police kept the raids secret while they pursued their investigations. Efforts culminated in 11 arrests and an appearance before the Reykjanes District Court last Friday. Only Two of the 11 were detained and the topic was held over for another day.
The 600 servers are all still missing, the Associated Press reports. Which is no surprise: x86 kit is pretty generic. The real prize inside a bitcoin-mining rig is either GPUs, RAM or nicely fast solid-state disks. Those components are all tiny compared to servers and could probably have been posted out of Iceland piecemeal without much hassle.
Iceland has become something of a hub for demanding workloads like cryptocurrency mining because cheap energy and low ambient temperatures make it a low-cost destination to run data centres and the kit inside them. The nation of Iceland also has a very low crime rate, will it stay low now the cryptocurrencies are sort after? Who knows. ®
