A Japanese court has demanded justice for a man, after acquitting him, after secretly installing and using a cryptocurrency mining program on the computers of visitors to his website.

A Japanese daily newspaper, The Mainichi, reported that the Tokyo High Court overturned a previous ruling which cleared the man of any wrongdoing.

According to the original indictment:

“The Tokyo High Court ruled the 32-year-old website designer operated the Coinhive program without the knowledge or permission of visitors to his website. The court described the man’s action as a “malicious crime used for personal gain” and fined him 100,000 yen ($910).”

In March last year the Yokohama District Court acquitted the man, saying the program only had a minor impact on the visitors’ computers and investigators had not cautioned him against the use of the software before indicting him.

He Doesn’t Have Users’ Consent

“Visitors were not informed of (the mining program) or given the chance to reject it,” The Mainichi quoted Presiding Judge Tsutomu Tochigi as saying.

Court Convicts Cryptojacker Cryptomining

How much the website owner made in fraudulent profits during the brief period in which Coinhive was involved remains unknown.

His fortunes seemed closely linked to those of altcoin focused on privacy, Monero (XMR), a favorite of mining programs that attackers use to perform covert activities. Monero saw a significant decline in value in 2018, while for Coinhive a hard fork further complicated matters.

By comparison, as of May 2018 the service became active on more than 300 websites, statistics reported at the time.

It is worth mentioning that, Cryptojacking appears to be a serious problem worldwide, with Interpol collaborating with a cybersecurity firm Trend Micro last month in a fresh attempt to address the problem.

In a related context, a group of legislators in Japan are preparing a bill to launch a sovereign digital currency, according to Reuters.

One of the legislators said the move was taken after Facebook decided to launch its cryptocurrency Libra project and China planned to issue it digital yuan.

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