The Department of Special Investigation has forwarded a case involving former provincial electricity officials accused of accepting bribes from bitcoin miners to the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC).
The investigation is part of a wider case involving a group accused of illegally tapping electricity supplies to operate power-intensive cryptocurrency mining businesses in Samut Sakhon and Uthai Thani provinces.
Authorities confiscated 3,642 bitcoin mining machines, with damages exceeding 3 billion baht. Financial transactions linked to the network were more than 5 billion baht.
A former assistant governor of the Provincial Electricity Authority and nine others were accused of accepting bribes from the group in exchange for facilitating the illegal use of electricity for digital currency mining.
The offence falls under laws governing misconduct by employees of state organisations and the Criminal Code.
Authorities seized more than 19 million baht in cash and bank deposits, along with financial evidence linking the suspects to the network. The NACC will now take up the case and decide whether to seek indictments.
Cryptocurrency mining is extremely power-intensive because the billions of calculations involved require huge amounts of computing power. Studies have shown that it hakes 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.
