The United States Attorney's Office announced the arrest and indictment of cryptocurrency miner Charles O. Parks, also known as “CP3O.” The individual fraudulently used multiple servers from two well-known cloud computing providers, resulting in total charges of nearly $3.5 million. To mine almost $1 million worth of cryptocurrencies. The agency calls his plan large-scale “cryptojacking.”
If convicted, Parks could face up to 20 years in prison for wire fraud and money laundering, and an additional 10 years for illegal financial transactions. The investigation was conducted by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, the FBI, and the New York City Police Department.
According to the report, Parks founded two companies, Multimillionaire LLC and CP3O LLC, created multiple accounts with those two cloud computing providers, and used their processing power and storage to sell Ethereum. (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Monero. (XMR). Mr. Parks did this by tricking providers into approving privileges and benefits for his account. He then sold these cryptocurrencies and laundered the funds through exchanges, NFT markets, online payment providers, and banks, concealing his connections.
Instead of paying the mounting bills from each cloud server, he used the laundered money on luxury goods, cars, jewelry, travel expenses, and more. It's unclear whether each company will ultimately be able to recover its funds from Parks. But if this is not the case, better checking account details before granting special privileges or perks could be an expensive lesson and lead to abuse of computing power by crypto miners.
Despite using multiple methods to launder cryptocurrency proceeds and accumulating unpaid bills, investigators tracked Parks down and arrested him on April 13th.
Cryptojacking, as the word suggests, means hijacking a system to mine virtual currency. Early forms of cryptojacking involved infecting a user's system without their knowledge and using their CPU and GPU to mine virtual currency without the victim's knowledge. There was also a Chrome extension that, unbeknownst to the user, used a hijacked computer to mine cryptocurrency without the owner's knowledge. Google eventually removed these extensions from its list.
Despite the efforts of several companies to thwart cryptojacking, companies like Parks are also making good use of it. The official account does not name the server provider, but other sources say the servers are located in Redmond, Washington, and Seattle, and include cloud computing centers for Microsoft and Amazon.
Cryptojacking has been a nuisance for years, whether targeting Tesla cloud computers or personal NAS. However, such incidents suggest that relevant authorities work with multiple departments to investigate, arrest, and prosecute those involved.
