Florida government employee arrested for using state-owned computers to mine digital currency

According to a statement released by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), an employee of the Department of Citrus was found using state-owned computer hardware to mine digital currencies . The offender, Matthew McDemott, was the information technology manager for the department, which is responsible for the operation of the Florida citrus industry.

The man was arrested and taken to the Polk County Jail shortly after the discovery. The digital currency mining operation was discovered after an assessment of the department’s utility bills, which increased the department’s electricity costs by $825 from October 2017 to January 2018, according to the department’s inspector general.

Mining is the process of validating transactions in a cryptocurrency network. He also explained McDemott’s motivation,

“A mining pool, or a team of people, mines virtual currencies by solving mathematical equations and earning rewards. Mining teams combine their resources to help offset costs.”

In fact, the cryptocurrency mining industry has coveted government-owned computing resources for a long time. Since the computers at certain state-owned facilities are quite powerful and because of the large amount of work they need to handle, individuals often use them for personal gain. For example, just a few days ago, the Louisiana Attorney General fired several IT employees after they were convicted of using government computers to mine Bitcoin .

In February 2018, a BBC report also revealed that hackers had successfully injected a cryptocurrency mining script into the Information Commissioner’s Office website. The hacked website would use the processing power of the visitor’s computer to mine cryptocurrency without the user’s knowledge.

The United States is not the only country that objects to the unauthorized use of its computers for digital currency mining. According to another report by the BBC, several Russian nuclear scientists were arrested after being discovered using a top-secret nuclear warhead facility in Sarov, Russia, to mine Bitcoin.

In most cases, the penalty for using government resources for personal gain is not severe. However, in this case, Matthew also used the government department's credit card to purchase 24 graphics cards for $22,000 between July and December 2017. Due to the nature of the heinous crime, he was charged with aggravated misconduct and his bail was set at $5,000.