Crypto miner arrested for skipping on $3.5 million in cloud server bills

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced the arrest and indictment of Charles O. Parks III, known as "CP3O," for allegedly renting large numbers of cloud servers to conduct crypto mining and then skipping out on paying the bills.

The DOJ explains that the defendant created a unique scheme that utilized $3.5 million worth of cloud computing resources to mine $970,000 worth of cryptocurrency at the expense of two cloud service providers.

Launched "tens of thousands" instances

Parks allegedly created fake corporate identities such as "MultiMillionaire LLC" and "CP30 LLC" to open numerous accounts with cloud service providers, gaining access to substantial computing power.

While the DOJ does not explicitly state what cloud providers were involved, they specify that one is located in Seattle, Washington, and the other in Redmond, Washington, the locations for Amazon and Microsoft.

The DOJ says he then tricked the providers into elevating his privileges and providing access to servers equipped with powerful graphics cards, which he used for mining Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Monero (XMR).

"During the course of the scheme, including from within the Eastern District of New York and elsewhere, PARKS III repeatedly requested that Subsidiary 1 provide him access to powerful and expensive instances that included graphics processing units used for cryptocurrency mining and launched tens of thousands of these instances to mine cryptocurrency, emplying mining software applications to facilitate the mining of tokens including ETH, LTC, and XMR in various mining pools, and employing tools that allowed him to maximize cloud computing power and monitor which instances were actively mining on each mining pool," reads the DOJ indictment.

The mined amounts were then laundered through purchasing non-fungible tokens (NFTs), converting and moving them to various cryptocurrency exchanges, or passing them through online payment platforms and traditional bank accounts.

The mounting bills on the cloud services were left unpaid, while Parks allegedly used the proceeds he had converted to USD to fund a lavish lifestyle that included first-class travel and purchases of luxury items and cars.

The DOJ announcement says Parks was arrested on April 13, 2024, in Nebraska, and his first hearing in an Omaha federal court is scheduled for tomorrow.

The indictment includes charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions, which incur a maximum of 30 years in prison.

In January 2024, the Ukrainian police, with the help of Europol, arrested a man who used hacked accounts belonging to various organizations to create a million virtual servers that mined $2,000,000 worth of cryptocurrency.

Cloud service providers can take several measures to minimize the risk of cryptojacking, including enforcing more stringent identity verification procedures, setting lower usage caps for new accounts, and implementing better anomaly detection systems that would minimize losses.