Meet the daring detectives sniffing out booby-trapped Bitcoin mines

“We will make electricity so cheap only the rich will burn candles,” Thomas Edison reportedly said during the first public demonstration of his light bulb. Unfortunately, it wasn’t made cheap enough. Annually,  almost $90 billion worth of energy gets stolen worldwide, particularly in India, Brazil, and Russia.

In the Netherlands, electricity theft and fraud is nothing new either. While commonly associated with weed farms, the last five years have seen a 20 percent spike in non-weed farm related electricity fraud cases. Among them is a new group of electricity thieves posing a challenge for police and distribution network operators: bitcoin miners.

In contrast to weed farms where the lights don’t need to be on night and day, bitcoin miners can keep mining bitcoin — and drain energy — 24/7.

The need for new methods of energy fraud detection is pressing if grid operators want to stay one step ahead of thieves. At the moment energy…