Russian man gets three-year sentence for stealing a friend’s mining rig

The 34-year-old convict was reportedly unable to make use of the stolen mining equipment due to a “lack of relevant knowledge.”

Authorities from Russia’s Zavolzhsky district have found a 34-year-old local man guilty of stealing cryptocurrency mining equipment worth more than 1.6 million Russian rubles (nearly $22,000).

According to a report shared by the Prosecutor’s Office of the Yaroslavl Region, the state prosecutor confirmed that the Yaroslavl resident was found entering a friend’s garage unlawfully back in February 2021 and stealing their mining equipment that was intended to be used for earning cryptocurrency.

The authorities found the Russian man to be guilty of committing a crime, citing large-scale theft of property and illegal entry.

In court, the now-convict reportedly admitted to the charges and voluntarily returned the stolen crypto mining equipment back to its original owner. Additionally, he also admitted to the court that he could not use the stolen equipment for mining due to the “lack of relevant knowledge.”

Based on the findings, the court convicted the man to “three years of a suspended sentence along with a probation period of three years.” This allows the defendant to have their case dismissed without actual jail time, given they comply with all the terms of probation.

Related: Russia grants $200K to build tool for tracing crypto transactions

On Aug. 4, Russian authorities announced the allocation of 14.7 million rubles ($200,000) to create systems to monitor and analyze Bitcoin-related crypto transactions.

As Cointelegraph reported, the Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service has contracted the job to RCO, a company indirectly backed by Sber, formerly known as Sberbank.

Russia has previously invested in an analytics system to track illicit activities by “partially reducing anonymity” of crypto transactions for Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Omni, as well as privacy-focused cryptocurrencies such as Dash and Monero (XMR).