A British government official has quit his job. He was caught illegally mining Litecoin at a nuclear research facility during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Briton, by the name of Karl Beacham, is resigning from his post after it was revealed that he was secretly mining Litecoin between December 2019 and June 2020.
The investigation was launched when the Chief Operating Officer of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) received an anonymous tip about mining on government property.
Has Management Approved Litecoin Mining?
Beacham reportedly started mining Litecoin in December 2019. However, he then switched off the mining hardware shortly after workers returned from the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown.
The Brit had worked at the plant for several years as a contractor and later as a full-time employee for the UKAEA. His place of work was the Culham Center for Fusion Energy, which is a leader in nuclear energy research.
Beacham alleges that management had withdrawn a previous permit for mining on the government property.
The authority valued his skills in the field of mechanical engineering for several years and therefore hired him. The court hearing the case said the UKAEA would likely have continued to employ him if he had completed the hearing.
At the time of writing, it is unclear how many Litecoin Beacham has been mining.
His resignation comes at a time when the UK government is trying to ease the rise in the cost of living through stimulus packages. Annual inflation rose by 7.9% in the UK in May 2023 – significantly more than in the US.
Illegal Crypto Mining: A Creative Lifeline?
Citizens in countries with runaway inflation often risk acquiring cryptocurrencies – sometimes illegally – in order to survive. Mining can be an important way to access Bitcoin, especially when there is no way to access a liquid market.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s actions to ease the financial burden on households provide just one-fifth of the average UK household income. They offer families minimal leeway, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation explained. Hot meals and toiletries are still unaffordable for many families. So the increasing need may push even more people to (illegally) procure crypto.
However, illegal crypto mining is actually often easy to detect. According to Johannes Ullrich of the SANS Internet Storm Center, the most noticeable sign of mining on government property is a significantly higher energy bill.
For example, New York City police arrested Suffolk County Chief of Information Technology Christopher Naples for mining crypto at the Riverhead Center in 2021. The mining facility cost the district approximately $6,000 to operate.
Remarkably, as in the case of Beacham, colleagues heard the noise made by the fans cooling its Litecoin hardware.
The British authority may also have overlooked the outgoing connections to the mining pool. This is because most antivirus programs block connections to mining pools, which is why obfuscation is necessary.
In addition, due to the increasingly smaller number of employees in the authorities, it is more difficult to detect malicious employees who mine cryptocurrencies, according to Ullrich.
Picture Copyright: promesaartstudio
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