Japan Issues First Prison Sentence for Crypto Miner

For the first time, a Japanese court has sentenced a cryptocurrency miner to prison. According to local media reports, a 24-year-old resident of Amagasaki (Hyogo Prefecture) was found guilty of using other people’s computers without their consent to mine virtual currency remotely.

The man embedded Coinhive mining software into a tool that allowed users to apply “cheats” (unauthorized modifications to manipulate certain parameters for personal gain) in an online game. He posted this tool on his blog, and when unsuspecting users downloaded the program, it began mining cryptocurrency using their computers.

The Sendai District Court sentenced the young man to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for three years.

Previously, in China, law enforcement arrested members of a hacker group who had compromised more than 100,000 computers in internet cafes across 30 cities to mine the cryptocurrency Siacoin.