Working at internet giant Baidu provided too much temptation for one employee, who got in legal hot water for harnessing the firm’s massive trove of servers to mine cryptocurrency.
According to a report from China-focused news site Abacus on Monday, An Bang – a senior engineer working on Baidu’s popular search engine – downloaded monero mining scripts onto around 200 Baidu servers between April and June 2018.
The extra load on the systems, though, was spotted by the company, which made a report to police, resulting in the staffer’s arrest. An was ultimately handed down three years’ jail time and a fine of 11,000 Chinese yuan ($1,568) in sentencing last month, as per the report.
The case is the latest in a string of instances where employees have succumbed to the ease of access to workplace power or infrastructure to try and make some free crypto, only to fall foul of the law.
Recently, in Russia, scientists at a top secret nuclear lab were given time in a penal colony or fines for the same crime. Ukraine has also had staff within its court system and railways caught red-handed mining their illicit gains at work.