Cryptocurrency Miner Steals $5M Worth Of Computing Power

The cryptocurrency news today show that scams are getting more and more frequent in the industry. In the latest news, a millionaire game developer named Marc Merrill was the latest victim of the Singaporean cryptocurrency miner who stole identities in order to use the Amazon Web Services and Google cloud computing power for crypto mining.

In an unsealed court filing on November 7, we could see that Forbes published that Marc Merrill is the co-founder of Riot Games who was the previous anonymous victim of the Singaporean national Matthew Ho’s identity theft scheme. Meanwhile, Riot Games is most famous as a developer which stands behind the massively successful League of Legends game.

Ho used Merrill’s American Express credit card information and went on to buy cloud computing power from Amazon, Google and others. In October, Ho was indicted by the United States prosecutors who said that the total worth of computing services used by Ho was estimated to more than $5 million. The prosecutors also alleged that the cryptocurrency miner became the largest AWS data consumer and said:

“In the few months his scheme remained active, Ho consumed more than $5 million in unpaid cloud computing services with his mining operation and, for a brief period, was one of Amazon Web Services (AWS) largest consumers of data usage by volume. Some of the bills were paid by the California game developer’s financial staff before the fraud was detected.”

The investigators claim that Ho was able to use the social engineering knowledge in order to gain access to admin privileges and large amounts of cloud computing power on Amazon and Google servers – mining various cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).

Ho also managed to trick Amazon into believing that he was the president of Riot Games – and created a fake Californian driving license that carried the Riot Games and the co-chairman’s name. Even though the Department of Justice charged Ho in early October, the identity of this developer became public only now.

The cryptocurrency miner who stole the mining power is now charged with eight counts of wire fraud, four counts of access device fraud and two counts of aggravated identity theft.