Louisiana Officials Testing Employees For Bitcoin Mining

The U.S. Louisiana State’s general attorney is reportedly investigating a group of former staffers to use official state resources for mining digital currency.

Officials in Louisiana have yet to publicly comment on the rumored investigation, according to a report from the Tribune News Service. The publication tolds, that the Investigation Bureau Of Louisiana began asking questions after starting to discover “hardware that they believed could have been used in the so-called mining of bitcoin.”

One source told the news outlet, that they had a worry about computer system, that might have been compromised. Some of the employees, whose names were not published, have reportedly denied that they engaged in the energy-intensive mining process, through which new coins are minted.

The investigation would be the latest in case of being confirmed in recent years, regarding the suspected use of public-office resources to mine cryptocurrencies.

For example, in January 2017 the Federal Reserve’s Office of the Inspector General fined a former staffer $5,000 after being caught mining bitcoins on a server owned by the U.S. central bank between 2012 and 2014. New York’s Department of Education later that year sanctioned an employee for bitcoin mining during their work-time on the computer between March and April 2014.