A ninth illegal mining farm connected to power lines in a year has been discovered near Irkutsk. Losses for the grid company exceeded 1 million rubles, and the owner of the equipment faces criminal charges.
Energy workers are increasingly identifying "gray" connections on their own and passing the data to law enforcement — camouflage in a forest area does not save miners from inspections. For the owners of such farms, this results in the seizure of equipment and liability for causing property damage.
How the farm near the village of Kuda was found
The Irkutsk electricity grid company reported an illegal connection to the police. Law enforcement officers discovered 18 devices in a forest area near the village of Kuda, placed in six soundproof boxes and connected to a power transmission line laid nearby.
The equipment has been seized, and the issue of opening a criminal case under Article 165 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (causing property damage) is being decided. The energy company's losses are estimated at more than 1 million rubles.
According to the energy company's assessment, in 2026 illegal mining "organizedly moved into the forests": since the beginning of the year, nine such farms have been identified, and law enforcement officers have seized more than 110 mining devices in total.
How illegal miners are found and punished
The farm near the village of Kuda is not the first such find in the area. In July, 12 devices under a camouflage net, connected to a power line pole, were discovered near the village of Stolbova; the preliminary estimate of damage to the power system then exceeded 2.5 million rubles.
Signals from energy workers in the region are part of systematic work: in 2025, the governor of the Irkutsk region approved a procedure for identifying illegal mining that obliges electricity suppliers to look for "gray" miners. Companies quarterly submit data on suspicious consumers to the Russian Ministry of Energy, and consumption twice the norm without seasonal or daily fluctuations is considered a sign of mining.
In Kabardino-Balkaria, a case has been opened under the same Article 165 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation against a 38-year-old resident of Nalchik who spent approximately 5 million rubles on electricity bypassing meters. The republic is among the ten regions where mining has been banned from January 1, 2025, to March 15, 2031.
Omsk shows how such stories end: a court sentenced four residents to prison terms who organized a farm at TPP-4 and paid a station employee 525,000 rubles for access to electricity. The installations operated for more than two years and consumed over 3.7 million kWh, and the damage exceeded 12.3 million rubles.
Unlike forest connections, legal home mining is limited to 6,000 kWh per month. NGE Farm founder Dmitry Zuev considers such a threshold insufficient: he proposed allowing individuals capacity of up to 15–30 kW and exempting them from taxes and reporting, but prohibiting mining in apartment buildings.
Cryptalist analysis: The tightening of control over energy consumption in the Irkutsk region and other regions is forming a stable trend: illegal mining is being pushed out of the "gray" zone, and the costs for violators are growing — from equipment seizure to criminal sentences. For the market, this means a gradual consolidation of hashrate among legal industrial operators and a reduction of the shadow segment, which in the medium term is more likely to stabilize than destabilize the supply of computing power.