The accusations made against the employees of the school district align with the recent crackdown on cryptocurrency mining operations by the US energy authority. Two senior staff members of the Patterson Joint Unified School District have been charged by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) for allegedly running a cryptocurrency mining operation on the grounds of the district’s ten schools, using school resources and increasing electricity bills.
The DOJ recently released a statement alleging that Patterson Joint Unified School District’s assistant superintendent and chief business officer, Jeffrey Menge, and the district’s IT director, Eric Drabert, collaborated to run a cryptocurrency mining farm and kept the earnings for themselves.
“They bought expensive graphics cards and ran a cryptocurrency mining farm at the school district with those cards, other district property, and electricity.”
The letter did not, however, specify how many of the district’s ten schools—which educate roughly 6,200 students—were utilised for the cryptocurrency mining activity. Furthermore, the kind of cryptocurrency mined was kept a secret.
A few of the cryptocurrencies that are mined the most frequently are Dogecoin, Monero, Bitcoin, and Raven Coin (RVN). Recent statistics from CoinGecko indicates that over 266,000 kilowatt hours of electricity are needed to mine one Bitcoin as a lone miner. This would require a monthly electricity use of 143 kWh and take about seven years.
The DOJ asserted that Menge stole between $1 million and $1.5 million, while Drabert took between $250,000 and $300,000, in addition to other purported fraudulent activities.
This coincides with the recent crackdown on cryptocurrency miners by the US energy authority as part of a national effort to reduce energy waste.
The US Department of electricity (DOE) said on February 1st that cryptocurrency miners are required to disclose how much electricity they have used over the previous six months. This action comes in response to worries about the recent spike in Bitcoin values, which has sparked an increase in cryptocurrency mining activity.
A day before to this, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said that starting next week, miners would be “required to respond with details related to their energy use” in response to a survey designed to gauge the amount of electricity used by nearby cryptocurrency mining companies. This is an issue that affects more than just Americans. Regulators from all throughout the world are working to reduce excessive electricity use. It was reported in December 2023 that ten Bitcoin mining operations were shut down by Indonesian police officials, who accused the operators of stealing electricity worth around to $1 million.