The crackdown on Bitcoin mining in Malaysia now starts from the air.

According to reports from Bloomberg and the Financial Times, drones sweep across rooftops, scanning for strange heat signals inside abandoned houses, vacant shops, and other dead zones. These hot spots almost always point to rigs running nonstop. On the ground, police walk with handheld sensors that pick up unusual electricity use. Citizens allegedly report birds chirping all night, but it’s just fake sounds playing on speakers to cover the roar of mining machines behind locked doors.

Miners move quickly. They set up in one place, install heat shields to hide their equipment, mount CCTV cameras, and wire their entrances with broken glass. Then they vanish before authorities arrive.

Over the last five years, officers have tracked down 14,000 illegal sites linked to power theft.That’s what the Energy Ministry said in the latest breakdown.The damage to Tenaga Nasional, Malaysia’s state-owned utility, has hit around $1.1 billion and counting.

By October, 3,000 new cases had already been logged just this year as Bitcoin’s price went up, crashed over 30 percent, and started rising again.

Taskforce forms to chase down mining operators

On November 19, Malaysia launched a new taskforce made up of the Ministry of Finance, Bank Negara Malaysia, and TNB.

Akmal Nasrullah Mohd Nasir, who serves as deputy minister of energy transition and water transformation, is in charge of the team. “You can actually even break our facilities. It becomes a challenge to our system,” Akmal said on Wednesday.

The rigs that miners use run around the clock, blasting out trillions of guesses every second. That’s how they validate transactions and get rewarded in Bitcoin. It’s a race. The more guesses you make, the better your odds. But it also burns massive amounts of electricity.

One group turned ElementX Mall, a half-dead shopping center overlooking the Strait of Malacca, into a full-on crypto farm. The mall shut down during the pandemic and never bounced back.

Floors are still unfinished. Wires hang from the ceiling. In early 2022, Bitcoin rigs filled the space. By 2025, they were gone. A TikTok video made the whole thing public.

A report from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance said over 75 percent of mining now happens in the United States. Malaysia used to hold 2.5 percent of global hashrate in January 2022, but Chainalysis hasn’t released a report/data on that since then.

Miners occupy failed malls, logging sites across country

Another outfit called Bityou took over a former logging yard in Sarawak. Under Malaysian law, Bitcoin mining is legal. But only if you get your power legally and pay your taxes. Akmal isn’t buying it. He’s joined raids before. He’s seen how these groups operate. When the taskforce held its first meeting on November 25, some members pushed to outlaw mining altogether.

“Even if you run it properly, the challenge is that the market itself is very volatile,” Akmal said. “I don’t see any well-run mining that can be considered as successful legally.”

He also thinks the way these operations move around shows signs of organized crime. “It’s clearly run by the syndicate, because of how mobile they are from setting up in one place to another place,” Akmal said. “It does have modus operandi.”

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