29-Year Old Man Faces 34 Years In Prison For Illegal Crypto Mining

A 29-year old man from Singapore is now facing 34 years in prison after getting in illegal crypto mining by stealing Amazon AWS and Google Cloud computing power and services as we are about to find out more in the blockchain news below.

Ho Jun Jia or better known as Matthew Ho was taken into the custody of the Singapore Police Force after being charged for illegal crypto mining under a 14-count indictment. According to the reports, he stole credit card and ID information from California residents, India and Texas to run a large-scale illegal crypto mining operation. The mining of the Ethereum and Bitcoin cryptocurrencies is noted as having taken place between 2017 and 2018. In an unsealed indictment document we can read that:

‘’Beginning in late 2017, which followed the surge in popularity of cryptocurrencies, Ho used victims’ personal and stolen credit card information, along with phony email addresses, which he created, designed to spoof the authentic email account of identity-theft victims, to open accounts and to obtain access to cloud computing services.’’

During the illegal crypto mining operation, he managed to steal up to $5 million in unpaid cloud computing bills and the department of justice issued a press release saying that for a brief period, Ho’s operation was one of the largest consumers of data usage by volume. The press release states that the wire fraud is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and the access device fraud is punishable by 10. The aggravated identity theft is punishable by mandatory two years in prison. According to the indictment, Ho made a few payments for goods and services on the victim’s stolen credit cards.

At least 16 payments were made with varying amounts and they even reached about $240,000 on the only credit card. Some of the money went towards payments on Google Cloud Services and crypto mining expenses. In 2017, the press release shows that he made payments amounting up to $135,861 to a victim’s credit card toward the balance owed on the Amazon Web services account. What we can further learn from the statements in the altcoin news today is that with the illegal crypto mining operations, Ho sold and exchanged the goods on various sites even at localbitcoins.com in order to obtain fiat currency.