Malaysia lost $1.1 BILLION worth of electricity to illegal Bitcoin miners The miners wire themselves straight into the grid or rig the meters so the power they burn never shows up on a bill Around 14,000 illegal mining sites were caught doing it, together stealing enough electricity to run 560,000 homes for a year The operations hide in abandoned houses, rented warehouses, even an unfinished shopping mall, sealed behind heat shields and soundproofing Some play looping recordings of bird sounds to cover the fan noise and neighbors calling about the strange birds is how police keep finding them Malaysia now hunts them with thermal drones scanning rooftops for heat, while software checks millions of power meters a day looking for electricity that never turns off More than 75,000 rigs were seized in over 3,000 raids since 2022, with 629 arrests and police have even crushed the confiscated machines with steamrollers The rigs keep coming back because the math behind them is absurd Mining one Bitcoin at household electricity rates costs about $1,320 in Iran, around $102,000 in the US and up to $321,000 in Ireland With Bitcoin trading near $62,000, mining at home in most of the West means losing money on every coin Stolen power drops the cost to zero and turns every coin into pure profit The most profitable mining farm on earth is the one that never gets a bill

Malaysia's durian boom sours as prices plunge Supply glut exposes challenge of matching production with demand Malaysian durian grower Joseph Foong says this year's hot weather caused a large harvest of the fruit, leading to a market price fall.