Law enforcement officials are going to confiscate mining farms in Ukraine more frequently. Miners are accused of threatening national security and other criminal and administrative violations.

Law enforcement agencies have demonstrated a surge in interest of mining activities for the last few months, Artem Afyan, lawyer and a Managing Partner of the Juscutum law firm, said. According to him, there are at least four cases of raids on mining farms and hardware seizures.

“I think that the sites are bearing. It's hard to say how they do it exactly. It could be electricity consumption, information from the hangout, they might track who and how much equipment was purchased for mining.”

Within such raids, mining equipment was confiscated, and farm owners were accused of illegal entrepreneurship, tax evasion, equipment smuggling and sometimes of illegal connection to power grids.

“Usually equipment for mining is imported and it is not cheap. And often it is utilised without documents, which makes it possible to qualify the owner's actions as illegal importation of equipment. Those who at least googled this issue may know that such an article was removed from the Criminal Code. And this causes a false sense of security. Yes, now they will not put one in prison, but there will be enough administrative responsibility to seize the servers.”

In some cases, miners face criminal penalties for the illegal use of cryptographic communication channels for information transmission or for terrorism financing. So, on 9 June, 2017, a court hearing was held in the Zhovtnevoy District Court in Zaporozhye. According to judicial materials, the owners of bitcoin and Ethereum mining equipment were accused of financing insurgents in the Lugansk and Donetsk Regions with mined cryptocurrencies.

“After that, this cryptocurrency is redirected by protected Internet channels to representatives of terrorist groups operating in the temporarily occupied territories of Lugansk and Donetsk regions who use it to pay for the administration of software and hardware complexes that is utilised in organising hacker attacks on Ukrainian authorities’ websites.”