Malaysia Raids Bitcoin Miners Stealing Its Power

On July 22 and 23, police in Malaysia’s southern state of Johor raided four rented properties, arrested three people and hauled away 71 bitcoin mining machines along with computers, routers and vehicles. Investigators say the crew had run the rigs for about a month on electricity drawn straight past the meter, bypassing the utility entirely.

Johor police chief Ab Rahaman Arsad put the stolen power at roughly 14,500 euros — about $16,600 — in that single month, against equipment capable of producing 17,200 to 21,500 euros of bitcoin over the same span. On those numbers the theft is the whole business model: strip out the free electricity and the operation barely clears a profit.

A small case in a large pattern

The Johor bust is a rounding error next to the national tally. Between 2020 and 2025, Malaysia’s largest electricity utility linked nearly 14,000 properties to power theft tied to cryptocurrency mining, with cumulative losses it estimates at around 1.1 billion euros. The energy ministry says detected cases climbed from 610 in 2018 to 2,397 in 2024 — a near-quadrupling in six years.

The economics explain the temptation. Electricity is 75% to 85% of a miner’s running costs, and the machines run flat out regardless of the bitcoin price. Steal the power and a marginal, money-losing rig becomes a cash machine. That is why illegal mining clusters where grids are subsidised or loosely metered, and why it moves the moment enforcement arrives — the rigs are light, the leases are short, and a new rented unit is a day’s work away.

The region is raiding too

Malaysia is not alone. Thailand’s Department of Special Investigation dismantled three major illegal-mining networks in 2025, seizing more than 6,390 machines and estimating losses to the state electricity authority above 24.9 million euros; one site alone held roughly 1,900 machines drawing about 575,000 euros of power a month. In Indonesia, police in North Sumatra raided ten sites in December 2023 and confiscated more than 1,100 rigs, with the state utility putting theft there above 700,000 euros over six months.

Laos took the opposite route and still stumbled. It licensed six miners in 2021 to soak up surplus hydropower — consumption peaked near 500 megawatts — but unpaid bills and thin local benefit soured the experiment, and last October the deputy energy minister said the country would cut power to miners and steer it toward metals, electric-vehicle manufacturing and exports instead.

Not a bitcoin problem, exactly

It is tempting to file this under “bitcoin’s energy problem,” but the raids point somewhere narrower. Mining is legal in Malaysia; what is illegal is stealing the electricity to do it. The theft thrives precisely where power is mispriced or hard to meter, which makes it as much a story about grid governance as about bitcoin. The honest version of the mining case has always been the opposite of this: rigs soaking up stranded or wasted energy that would otherwise be flared or curtailed, paying full freight for it.

Malaysia’s own experts are drawing that line. Academics quoted after the raid called not for a mining ban but for smart meters at substations, licensing, beneficial-ownership transparency and financial investigations — the tools that force operators to pay the real cost of power rather than shifting it onto everyone else’s bill.

Why it matters: the ugly side of mining is theft where electricity is subsidised and unmetered — a pricing failure the industry’s honest case is built to solve, not commit.

Editor’s note: figures are as reported by Malaysian, Thai and Indonesian authorities and local media; loss estimates are utility and police figures, not independently audited. Nothing here is financial advice.