Ethereum [ETH] mining scam in school campus; principle gets sacked

The blockchain community has had a massive impact on society, across multiple industries, since its inception in the 2000s. However, it is still debatable as to which of the sides – positive or negative – has a bigger imprint on the world. A veritable stress-worthy operation that often hits environmentalists in the throat is crypto-mining, due to its heavy consumption of power.

According to recent reports in the local news portals of China, it has been discovered that Ethereum [ETH], the second-largest coin on the index, has caused a Hunan-based school much trouble. The principle, Lei Hua of Puman Middle School in Chenzhou, Hunan province was sacked over mining ETH secretly inside the campus.

Hua began mining Ether last year, in the month of June. The total cost of the mining set up came up to around $1,440. However, the cost of electricity consumed by the operation was high, which caused Hua to run the mining process within the school campus. The miner used school resources such as electricity and free internet to mine the tokens successfully.

There were a total of nine machines that strained and exhausted the campus power to almost reach a point where the operation could have caused a fire in the school, also making the internet connection oddly slow. The authority concerned with the school infrastructure turned suspicious and launched an audit, leading to the discovery of the mining equipment.

The profits obtained by the cryptocurrency mining were also confiscated by the concerned authority, in addition to dispelling the culprit from the school.

This is not the first time that crypto-mining has been under the shadows of corruption. Monero [XMR], which is the leading privacy coin at the moment has also experienced multiple cases of scam, hack, crypto-jacking and more.

Amazon, a high-performing market stock and part of FANG [Facebook Amazon Netflix Google] also became the victim of the Monero crypto-jacking scam wherein the miners secretly ran Coinhive in the background of multiple website portals to mine Monero illegally.