An arrest warrant has been issued for a former Cohasset town employee accused of running a cryptocurrency mine out of a crawl space under a local school after he failed to appear for a court hearing in Quincy Thursday morning, officials said.
Nadeam Nahas, 39, was due to appear in Quincy District Court to face charges of vandalizing a school and fraudulent use of electricity. A judge issued a default warrant for his arrest when he failed to appear, according to David Traub, spokesman for the Norfolk district attorney’s office.
Cohasset police were alerted to the crypto-mining operation in December 2021 after the town’s facilities director noticed electrical wiring, temporary duct work and numerous computers that seemed out of place during a routine inspection of the school, police said Wednesday.
The facilities director contacted the city’s information technology director and “it was discovered that this was a cryptocurrency mining operation that was illegally connected to the school’s electrical system,” police said.
Nahas was identified as a suspect after a three-month investigation. After a hearing in Quincy District Court, a criminal complaint was issued against Nahas.
Nahas resigned from his post in early 2022, police said.
Cohasset Public Schools Superintendent Patrick Sullivan said the district had no comment on the matter Wednesday night.
Crypto mining uses computers to create digital currency and is known to use significant amounts of electricity.
Cryptocurrency transactions are stored in an encrypted database called a blockchain. Each new transaction must be verified using extremely complex mathematics before it can be confirmed and added to the blockchain. This task is performed by people called “miners”, because they are paid in bitcoin to run the program that verifies transactions. It’s like mining gold, only with computers.
However, because the underlying mathematics is so complex, it requires extremely advanced computers to run bitcoin mining. These machines rely mainly on GPUs – graphics processing units, rather than the standard central processing units, or CPUs, that power the typical laptop.
GPUs were originally created for use in video games and image processing, because they are much better than CPUs at running complex math problems very, very quickly. But even a typical GPU can take months to confirm just one blockchain transaction. So serious miners set up banks of machines with dozens or hundreds of GPUs burning away.
These chips use huge amounts of juice. Mining for the world’s most famous cryptocurrency, bitcoin, uses more electricity worldwide than the electricity consumption of Argentina.
The White House estimates that all crypto mining worldwide uses just under one percent of global electricity production, or the equivalent of all the juice used by all conventional data centers in the world.
This story will be updated as more information becomes available.
Nick Stoico can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @NickStoico. Daniel Kool can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @dekool01. Hiawatha Bray can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeTechLab.
