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On APR 24, 2018, Icelandic police jumped on the trail of a series of fugitives who had orchestrated what is now called the ‘Big Bitcoin Heist‘ – wherein some 600 Bitcoin mining rigs were stolen during four separate incidents between December 2017 and January 2018.
The theft, which has seen the misappropriated goods valued at some $2 million USD, had previously resulted in the arrest of eleven people.
Now, the Associated Press reports that another fugitive on the lam has been arrested as far away as Amsterdam.
According to police reports, Sindri Thor Stefansson – one of the initial suspects detained for his apparent involvement in the theft – had escaped from Iceland’s ‘Sogni’ low-security prison, and had flown to Sweden using a falsified passport.
Stefansson was subsequently arrested on Sunday night in Amsterdam. Local police spokesperson Rob van der Veen had confirmed Stefansson’s apprehension, though was not able to offer further details.
In a statement to the press, Stefansson had noted that he would proceed to challenge his custody at the European Court of Human Rights.
Stefansson's alleged involvement in the heist, which has been called “one of the largest criminal cases in Icelandic history”, saw a coordinated string of four thefts steal away some 600 Bitcoin mining rigs.
In the wake of the theft, Icelandic police have begun tracking the mining rigs by searching for signs of significant electricity consumption, in the hopes that indications of high energy usage might reveal the whereabouts of the stolen computers.
Olafur Helgi Kjartansson – police commissioner on the southwestern Reykjanes peninsula – had previously quipped that “This is a grand theft on a scale unseen before… Everything points to this being a highly organized crime.”
Iceland’s data center industry and geothermal as well as hydroelectric energy sources have created an affluent bitcoin mining ecosystem, and local authorities have now begun exploring the potential applications of a cryptocurrency mining tax.
Author From Cointelegraph.com Ana Alexandre
Ana Alexandre
Total change in her career took Anastasia into the world of analytics and business information as a researcher and translator in 2010. Sometime later she got into FinTech, a dynamically developing segment at the intersection of financial services and technology. Ana joined Cointelegraph in September 2017.
