Crypto miner arrested for skipping on millions in cloud server bills

A 45-year-old Nebraska man Charles O. Parks III has been charged with numerous financial crimes, including wire fraud and money laundering, as part of a scheme defrauding two cloud storage providers based in Seattle and Redmond, Washington.

Ars Technica, reporting on the indictment, beat us to the punch in alleging that the cloud providers in question are probably Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Parks registered a number of accounts using various identities to secure the computing resources, and continued registering accounts even after being kicked off of the Seattle provider for non-payment and suspicions of fraudulent activity.

Don’t try this at home

Though Parks is estimated to have cost both providers a combined $3.5 million in unpaid service fees and the sheer amount of energy consumed by his operation, the whole charade only netted around $1 million. That’s probably not worth the 30 year custodial sentence ...