Singaporean Unlawful Mining Indicted in the United States

A citizen of Singapore was arrested in the United States for a large-scale mining operation using robbed identity and credit card data.

The 14-count indictment notes that between October 2017 and February 2018 the man, Ho Jun Jia, also known as Matthew Ho, 29, ruled the illicit crypto-mining scheme after a rise in digital coin popularity and price.

The scheme has largely been driven by fraud and identity theft. It has supposedly opened accounts with various US cloud service providers using a popular California Video-game developer’s robbed identity and credit card data. He used these accounts for crypto-currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The prosecution also argues that Ho has built a network of fake e-mail accounts and used social engineering to manipulate Cloud Computing providers to accept the’ higher account rights’ and increased the ability and the power of the system to process and store them and delayed billing.’

According to the indictment, during the project, Ho accessed over $5 million in unpaid cloud computing services. For a short time he was one of the biggest consumers of information by amount for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Before the scam was revealed, the accounting staff of the California game developer paid several bills.

In addition to the AWS accounts, the defendant opened accounts with Google Cloud Services that were discovered by a Texas resident and established a tech company in India.

Ho was arrested in Singapore on 26 September 2019 and charged for alleged crimes committed under Singapore law. Ho is now under investigation.

The Department of Justice states that if found guilty, Ho faces up to 20 years ‘ imprisonment for wire fraud and up to 10 years ‘ incarceration for access fraud because aggravated identity theft will make him have a two-year prison obligation to continue with any other punishment levied in that case.