Altcoin News: Ex-Bitmain Employee Convicted of Stealing 100 BTC

September 12, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

A former employee of mining giant Bitmain was sentenced to one year and three months in prison for connecting his employer to the server to steal Bitcoins, 8btc writes with reference to Chinese media.

The accused Mr. Zhong began his work at Bitmain in November 2015. On September 15, 2017, he remotely accessed the company’s computer using TeamViewer and, using root privileges, went to the rented Bitmain server in the Alibaba Cloud service. After that, he brought 100 Bitcoins to his personal wallet, inserting the code into the Bitmain Bitcoin wallet program.

On September 16, Bitmain turned to the police, finding a lack of Bitcoins on their wallets. After the incident, Zhong voluntarily surrendered to the police and was detained on January 2, 2018. He returned 90 Bitcoins to his former employer.

The court ruled that Zhong illegally gained access to data in the computer information system using technical means and caused economic losses worth more than 10,000 yuan. In addition to the prison term, he was fined 50,000 yuan ($7,000). The missing 10 Bitcoins were also returned to Bitmain.

At the same time, he managed to avoid a sentence under the theft article. As 8btc portal explains, Bitcoin was indeed recognized as virtual property by the People’s Bank of China in a statement dated December 5, 2013. However, the status of cryptocurrency as the property was not fixed in state legislation, which is why the court refused to recognize it as such.

Author: Marko Vidrih