There was the case of a network admin who installed, without authorisation, some piece of distributed computing software on all the machines at his place of work.

This significantly raised the electricity bills, so he was caught and prosecuted for it.

Ridiculous maximum sentences for computer misuse are not a new thing. :-(

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300

> A college computer technician who offered his school's unused computer processing power for an encryption research project will be tried next month in Georgia for computer theft and trespassing charges that carry a potential total of 120 years in jail.

> David McOwen was working as a PC specialist at the state-run DeKalb Technical Institute in 1998, when he learned about a project by the non-profit organization distributed.net that allowed computer users to donate their unused processing power to test the RC5 encryption algorithm. Noticing that many of the machines he maintained on the seven DeKalb campuses sat idle for long periods, McOwen installed distributed.net clients at several of those locations while performing a Y2K upgrade on the machines in 1999.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1782050.stm

> But the case never went to court as earlier this month Mr McOwen accepted a plea agreement to end his two-year legal nightmare.

> Under the terms of the deal, he walked away with probation, a small fine and community service.

Well most illegally grown marijuana uses large amounts of stolen electricity (absolute control of temperature and lighting is a must to get the highest yield). I'm guessing it would not be profitable to grow it otherwise (or not as profitable).

Similar issues will affect Bitcoin mining in the long run however I expect this to be more something that is achieved through mining bots and not through setting up server farms in houses with diverted electrical trunking.

As to electricity companies finding out, the issue here is that the 'noise' from loss of electricity in the network masks a specific house consuming huge amounts of electricity. I'm guessing there must be some sort of profiling going on to determine if an occupied house is using too little electricity.

> Well most illegally grown marijuana uses large amounts of stolen electricity

Really? I am under the impression that stolen electricity is one of the easiest ways that illegal grow operations are discovered.

It's not exactly my area of expertise. In the UK, infra-red cameras on helicopters are used to identify houses with 'hot' roofs. It would seem nonsensical to do this if electricity companies could easily identify theft.

As part of reading a meter I'm guessing an inspection of the meter box can be made. I'm guessing the modern digital electricity meters are able to report usage stats back to the company.

I'm using the word 'guessing' quite a lot here.

People can use a lot of electricity without generating a lot of heat in a room that looks like it would make a nice grow room. In other words, a very small percentage of people using a lot of electricity are growing pot. The percentage of people with a hot room and hydroponics garbage in the back dumpster that are growing pot is a lot higher.

I don't believe that helicopters are specifically sent out to look for hot roofs in the UK without a reasonable suspicion.

I believe that the power companies are more likely to be of use in detecting cannabis growers. I am sure that in some areas a mini arms race has gone on for decades with cannabis growers taking electricity from the 'other side' of the meter, so that nothing shows up on the bill. I am sure that electricity companies have also worked out how to compare electricity supplied versus electricity charged for in order to detect this, at least to street level, and, after that, the infra-red camera can come into play to detect the hot-roof, either by themselves or by the police.

Given a choice of stealing electricity for cannabis or bitcoins I would be surprised if the latter was more profitable. That said, bitcoin miners probably do arouse the suspicions of the authorities. Therefore it would be quite convenient to have a 'server farm' downstairs with a 'cannabis farm' in the loft. Therefore, when the authorities come round there is a plausible reason for the electricity usage.

Growers steal electricity to avoid detection by the power companies auditing their usage. Considering that a grow-op can produce hundreds of thousands of dollars, the power bill's just a blip on the radar.

They bypass the meters taking all sorts of Jerry rigged risks when doing so.

It's the other way around. If you try to run a grow-op while normally connected to the grid, the electric utility will report your well-above-average usage to the police immediately, who will come and visit immediately.

Thus grow-ops are basically forced to find a way to connect to the grid in an unmetered, illegal fashion to avoid being reported.

>> most illegally grown marijuana uses large amounts of stolen electricity

Source? Reasoning?

pretty much any report of a cannabis farm getting busted and ofgem (the Uk electricity regulator) estimated that a third of the stolen electricity is used for this purpose

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/cannabis-farms-respo...

reasoning: you're using indentured trafficked workers trapped in homes (and possibly also fraudulently claiming housing benefits) to grow an illegal product. Electricity will be a significant cost (in the UK, at least) and so stealing it makes more sense.

Wait, indentured trafficked workers are used to grow marijuana?

Certainly in the UK this is the case - people are smuggled into the UK, and have to repay the cost of being smuggled by growing cannabis (or sex work, or similar). Passports are removed, fear is created about going to police, people are locked into houses, etc.

Yes, from what I understand - BBC Radio 4's PM news program covered this yesterday. They were focusing on Vietnamese trafficking gangs.

Bypass the meter. Abnormally high readings are reported in some places.

you can't bypass all meters. the one in your home is not the only one that the utility has.

Can confirm.

I have sourced all the mcdonalds wifi in my area to grow marijuana. It's like how the sonar in the dark knight works.

All of the free wifi gets channeled in to my grow lights.

Part of the reason for that is that people who use non-stolen electricity to grow get busted; the electricity companies monitor usage and the police have access to that information.

>> So we're talking about people doing it with _actually_ stolen electricity, and you'd hope that the electricity companies were good at spotting that nowadays

Unless you simply use a ton of machines, that alone will generate some extra electricity, but nothing noticeable, versus using a huge botnet to do it for you:

"The ZeroAccess botnet is one of the largest known botnets in existence today with a population upwards of 1.9 million computers, on any given day, as observed by Symantec in August 2013."

and

"These figures give some indications of the additional power requirements of bitcoin mining on a single computer infected by ZeroAccess. We can now extrapolate these figures out to 1.9 million bots and see what the total cost/impact is likely to be for the whole botnet.

If each KWh of electricity costs $0.162 then it would cost $0.29 to mine on a single bot for 24 hours. But multiply this figure by 1.9 million for the whole botnet and we are now looking at energy usage of 3,458,000 KWh (3,458 MWh, enough to power over 111,000 homes each day.) This amount of energy is considerably greater than the output of the largest power station in Moss Landing, California, which could produce 2,484 MW and would come with a corresponding electricity bill of $560,887 a day. Despite the costs, all this energy will create just $2165 worth of bitcoins a day! With these sorts of sums it would not be economic to undertake bitcoin mining with this setup if you had to pay for it yourself. But if the bitcoins are being mined at someone else’s expense, then that changes the picture completely and it becomes a highly attractive proposition."

source: http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/grappling-zeroaccess-b...

Once you make it attractive for someone to do this, they're going to do it, point blank. Add in no oversight or regulation and you have a recipe for criminals to come in and take over.

With 1.9 million bots, I suspect that they can do better than hugely inefficient CPU bitcoin mining. And if that's not true, it will be eventually, as the cost (in CPU cycles) of mining gets higher.

Bitcoin mining has to be the most profitable (or at least close to it) use of a botnet for this to happen, and since the value of mining keeps decreasing this will by definition not be the case at some point (if it even is now).