The illicit mining equipment was found at an agro-industrial enterprise and several private farms. The masterminds behind these underground operations cleverly concealed their activities by housing the mining farms in a barn and playing recordings of sheep and cattle noises to mask the sound of the devices.
However, these tactics proved futile as the power engineers managed to identify the illegal connections to the electrical networks. Their state-of-the-art monitoring tools allowed them to remotely analyze electricity usage patterns and detect instances of energy theft.
According to experts from Rosseti-Yug, the combined consumption of the discovered mining farms amounted to approximately 800,000 kWh, equivalent to a value of over 3 million rubles. The Department of Economic Security and Anti-Corruption of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Volgograd Region is now handling the case of electricity theft.
In a separate incident, five individuals from the Chelyabinsk region were recently sentenced to prison for setting up a fictional company in Irkutsk with the purpose of selling mining equipment.