Police and electricity officials have seized 996 bitcoin mining devices at a company that they say also stole huge amounts of electricity to run them, in Phanat Nikhom district of Chon Buri.
The devices were impounded in a raid at JIT Co in tambon Na Wang Hin on Wednesday, said Pol Maj Gen Montree Theskhan, commander of the Crime Suppression Division.
He said the company was registered to carry out digital asset trading but also stole electricity by using modified power meters to run the cryptocurrency mining rigs.
Solar panels were installed in the compound but they were not connected to the devices.
Losses incurred by electricity providers were estimated at hundreds of millions of baht.
Cryptocurrency mining is an extremely power-intensive activity because the billions of calculations involved require huge amounts of computing power. Studies in the US showed that, in 2023, even the most highly efficient setups would consume about 155,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity to mine a single bitcoin.
In Thailand, assuming a power tariff of 4 baht per kWh, that works out to 620,000 baht. The average household power bill in Thailand has been estimated at 750 baht a month.