In Japan, the high court has found a person guilty of installing and using illegal crypto-mining programs without the consent of the visitors on his website. Earlier in March, the Yokohama court district found this unnamed man not guilty of the charges he was accused of. However, with the reversal, the person in question, a web-designer by profession has expressed his dismay and would appeal to a higher court.
Judge Tsutomu Tochigi has called the event as a ‘malicious crime which is used for personal gain’ and clearly stated that the visitors were not informed about the mining at any point in time. They were given no choice of accepting or rejecting it.
Illegal crypto-mining programs history
Crypto-mining programs require a lot of electrical power and computing power. With the increasing popularity of mining crypto, illegal crypto-mining programs such as malware are installed in someone else’s computer without their knowledge. The malware can use the computer’s speed and power to run the algorithms required for mining.
Last year in May, the Australian Police arrested a 33-year-old man, who served as an IT contractor at an Australian government agency, of adjusting his work computer for crypto mining for self gains. A similar incident happened in California too last year.
The 32-year-old Japanese IT worker in question here was acquited of all the charges in March last year. The Yokohama court understood that the effect and harm it caused was minimal and had very little impact. The court also said that the investigating authority never warned him not to use such programs.
While reversing the decision, the high court said that these things should not be even considered for acquittal. The court slammed him with a fine of 100,000 Yen ($910).
The website designer had installed Coinhive, a crypto-mining program software, on the website. Whenever users visit the site, the software would start working on the algorithms automatically without any knowledge of the user.
Featured image from Pixabay
