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A man from Iceland was sentenced to four years and six months prison sentence after he was arrested for stealing Bitcoin mining equipment according to crypto news media outlet Iceland Monitor reported on January 17.

Sindri Þór Stefánsson boarded a ticket in April 2018 to Stockholm from Reykjavik allegedly with a stolen passport and was later arrested in Amsterdam and was brought back home. He claimed that he fled legally custody to Sweden.

Stefánson told the court that he had six other accomplices and was sentenced the lengthy jail term. The stolen equipment was reportedly worth about $2 million and was related to two other attempted heists back in December 2017 and January 2018.

The target of the heist was Nordic IT Company Advania and the now seven defendants will have to pay a compensation of about $273,000.

The criminal was served with the longest prison sentence out of all the other accomplices which came after the claimed to have been legally allowed to board the Sweden Flight at the time when he fled the Sogni prison.

When the custody warrant ran out, the judge renewed it in the 24-hour window he had but the in the interim there was a statement where it showed that Stefánsson was free to travel. He added in a statement:

 “I was forced to sign a paper stating that I was free travel, but if I could, I would stay in a prison room until the extension of custody was approved.’’

In September  2018, many businesses in Iceland planned to get out of the Bitcoin mining industry and focus solely on the ‘’pure blockchain businesses.’’