A 34-year-old man was found guilty of stealing Bitcoin mining rig worth more than 1.6 million rubles (almost $22,000) he reportedly could not use the stolen mining equipment due to a “lack of relevant knowledge.”
According to a report released by the Prosecutor’s Office of the Yaroslavl Region, a Yaroslavl citizen was caught illegally accessing a friend’s garage in February 2021 and taking their mining equipment, which was meant to be used to earn bitcoin.
Authorities judged the Russian man guilty of a crime, citing large-scale property theft and illegal entry as reasons.
The defendant admitted to the allegations in court and voluntarily returned the stolen crypto mining equipment to its rightful owner.
He further admitted to the court that he was unable to use the stolen mining equipment owing to a “lack of required knowledge.”
The court sentenced the guy to “three years of a suspended sentence and three years of probation” based on the findings.
This allows the defendant to have their case dismissed without having to serve any time in prison, as long as they follow all of the rules of probation.
On Aug. 4, Russian authorities declared that 14.7 million rubles ($200,000) would be allocated to the development of tools to monitor and analyze Bitcoin (BTC)-related crypto transactions.
The Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) has contracted the job to RCO, a business indirectly supported by Sber, formerly known as Sberbank, as Cointelegraph previously reported.
Russia previously invested in an analytics system to identify illegal activity by “partially lowering anonymity” of cryptocurrency transactions for Bitcoin, Ether (ETH), Omni (OMNI), and privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Dash (DASH) and Monero (XMR).
