Japanese authorities have issued out their first ever sentence for a malicious crypto mining offence according to reports out today. Interestingly though, the person in question has only been found guilty of illegally mining just $45.00 worth of Monero. Hardly worth going to prison for, is it?

We can’t be sure if this is just the start of a bigger investigation, or if this is just a case of the authorities trying to make an example of someone, either way though, it carries a very strong message that no form of malicious mining or cryptojacking will be tolerated, no matter how little the value of mined currency is.

According to reports, Yoshida Shinkaru (24) has been found guilty of using Coinhive to maliciously mine Monero by using an online gaming cheat tool to plant the Coinhive scripts into the machines of other users. According to zdnet.com:

“Shinkaru used Coinhive, a legitimate Monero mining tool and Javascript library. The script is generally embedded in website domains. However, in this case, Coinhive was reportedly planted within an online gaming cheat tool which was then made available for download.”

Moreover:

“Unwitting victims would download the software from his blog and their PCs would begin mining for cryptocurrency without their knowledge or consent -- the proceeds of which ended up in Shinkaru's hands. The software was downloaded approximately 90 times. However, Shinkaru made only 5000 yen from his activities, the equivalent of $45.”

See more for yourself,

here

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$45.00 is hardly worth taking a sentence for is it. We also know that their are people in Japan who have no doubt caused more damage than this through malicious mining, so it just seems that Shinkaru has found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, this is a cybercrime and honestly, he shouldn’t have been trying to steal from people anyway, overall though you do have to ask yourself why the authorities have gone to such extremes here. As mentioned earlier, I sort of guess that it is simply to make an example of Shinkaru, to hopefully inspire other people to move away from the temptation to get involved in such criminal activities.

As a result of this, Shinkaru will not serve a one-year prison sentence. This means through his crime, he’s earned around $0.12 per day for the time he will spend behind bars. Let this serve as a reminder just how malicious this sort of activity is, please don’t maliciously mine cryptocurrency, it’s as simple as that really.