A Singapore man has been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for stealing cloud computing power for cryptocurrency mining.

Ho Jun Hia, also known as Matthew Ho, is accused of using stolen identity and credit card information to open accounts at multiple U.S. cloud service providers which he then used to mine bitcoin and Ethereum. The most prominent cloud provider Ho signed up for was Amazon Web Services Inc., where he racked up a bill larger than $5 million, briefly becoming one of the largest AWS data users at the time of the offenses.

The scam saw Ho stealing the identity and financial details of a California-based video game development company to open accounts across various service providers. Between October 2017 and September 2018, using the company’s name alongside stolen IDs and credit cards, Ho ran up $6.9 million in total across various providers for his mining operation. The bitcoin and Ethereum mined were sold via LocalBitcoins and LocalEthereum, both peer-to-peer marketplaces as well as via Facebook Inc.

In an unfortunate twist, Ho was able to get away with the scam for nearly a year as both the unnamed gaming development company as well the individual victims were paying their bills without checking the details. It was only when they started noticing they were being billed for cloud services they had not purchased that authorities become involved.

Ho was indicted Wednesday on 14 charges including wire fraud that is punishable by up to 20 years in prison, access device fraud with a 10-year maximum sentence, and aggravated identity theft with each charge punishable by a mandatory two years in prison.

Whether Ho will ever be extradited to the U.S. to face the charges is another matter. The U.S. and Singapore do have a longstanding extradition agreement, but in the meantime Ho is facing charges in Singapore for the same crimes after being arrested by local police Sept. 26.

Photo: Nickobolensky/Wikimedia Commons