​Power engineers of the Irkutsk region filed the thousandth lawsuit against illegal miners

What’s new? According to outlet Altair, power engineers of the Irkutsk region filed their thousandth lawsuit in connection with the illegal mining of cryptocurrencies. Data on the case has not been disclosed yet, but the most common reason for going to court is abnormally high power consumption. For example, in the case of a resident of the village of Novaya Razvodnaya, an inspection by Irkutskenergosbyt showed that throughout the year the average monthly electricity consumption in the 307 square meter house was almost 80 000 kilowatt-hours. The figure exceeds the total consumption of 15 other houses on the same street.

Altair’s material

How do courts make decisions? The resident of the village of Novaya Razvodnaya did not agree with the lawsuit that he used electricity for commercial purposes. In court, the man tried to explain the high consumption by domestic purposes (the use of heat guns to dry the basement). But because of the lack of convincing evidence, according to the decision of the Irkutsk Regional Court, he will have to compensate the power engineers more than 2 million Russian rubles.

In January, a resident of the Bayandayevsky district of the Irkutsk region unsuccessfully tried for the third time to challenge the court ruling, under which he had to pay Irkutskenergosbyt 28,65 million RUB for illegal mining. According to Interfax, the rigs consumed up to 500 000 kilowatt-hours each month — about 75% of the total consumption of the village, which has 10 500 houses.

Of the 1000 lawsuits filed against illegal miners, there are already 600 positive decisions. According to them, the defendants must pay power engineers more than 260 million RUB.

Situation with mining in the region. In 2021, the Irkutsk region became one of the nine most popular regions of the Russian Federation for mining. In August 2022, the local authorities introduced differentiated electricity tariffs for individuals in order to combat illegal mining, but the situation in the region did not change, and its residents appealed to President Vladimir Putin to solve the problem.

It was also reported in August that more than 9000 illegal cryptocurrency mining devices were confiscated from Irkutsk CHPs since the beginning of the year. The authorities of the region said that such activity increases the risks of power outages and poses a threat to fire safety. Later, Governor Igor Kobzev allowed the possibility of allocation of areas in the region for the construction of mining farms in case a federal law on cryptocurrency mining was adopted.

For how the mining industry works in Russia, as well asattempts to regulate cryptocurrencies in the country, read GetBlock Magazine’s special materials.