In brief
- Tenaga Nasional Berhad reported RM 4.57 billion in losses from illegal crypto-mining activity across 13,827 premises.
- Authorities earlier flagged a 300 percent jump in crypto-linked power theft and rising cases first discovered back in 2018.
- Local observers expect tighter monitoring, new licensing lanes, and faster enforcement as Malaysia weighs reforms.
Malaysia’s state electric utility provider, Tenaga Nasional Berhad, said illegal crypto-mining operations have drained roughly $1.1 billion worth of electricity over the past five years. That's a sharp spike from the rising power-theft cases authorities had disclosed earlier in May.
Malaysia’s Energy Transition and Water Transformation Ministry told Parliament in a written reply dated Tuesday that 13,827 premises had illegally used electricity to mine crypto since 2020, causing $1.1 billion (RM 4.57 billion) in losses to the state utility provider, according to figures first published by local outlet The Edge Malaysia.
“In an effort to curb this issue, a database that stores complete records of owners and tenants of premises suspected of being involved in electricity theft related to Bitcoin mining activities” had been established by the state utility provider, according to the ministry, as cited in a Reuters report.
The losses reportedly stem from farms that bypassed meters or tapped straight into distribution lines, allowing industrial-scale rigs to run for long stretches without triggering routine monitoring.
Decrypt reached out to Tenaga Nasional Berhad and the Energy Transition and Water Transformation Ministry for comment and will update this article should they respond.
Earlier in May, authorities reported a 300% rise in crypto-linked power theft cases and detailed raids that uncovered farms wired directly into distribution lines, marking the first formal warning that the problem had escalated beyond isolated sites.
Cases of crypto-linked electricity theft in Malaysia were first discovered in 2018, with the number reaching 2,397 cases by 2024, according to the state utility’s data cited by local media in May.
Too big to ignore?
Local observers said weak oversight and outdated load-tracking tools have allowed many of the illicit setups to run uninterrupted.
“Cheap, subsidized electricity and rising Bitcoin prices created the perfect incentive for bad actors to bypass meters. The profit spread was simply too big to ignore,” Gaius, a pseudonymous core contributor at ReadyGamer and at TankDAO, told Decrypt.
He noted their country’s systems were not designed to flag continuous usage, a factor that allowed some operations to go on for months before detection.
“Our metering and monitoring systems weren’t built for the 24/7 industrial loads that crypto-mining creates,” and many of these operations “ran quietly for months before anyone noticed,” Gaius added.
Crypto mining in Malaysia “sits in a regulatory grey zone—legal in principle but poorly defined in practice,” Gaius explained. “That ambiguity made it easy for illegal operators to hide behind crypto as a narrative.”
The disclosures from Malaysian authorities could mark a “shift toward tighter energy-use monitoring, especially at the substation level,” with faster and “data-driven enforcement,” he said.
Regulation on crypto mining might also move toward “a clearer licensing lane for legitimate mining farms” with “proper tariffs, inspections, and registration instead of operating in the shadows.”
Still, there is risk in possible “over-correction” through “policies that conflate crypto with power theft,” Gaius said.
“The challenge is to punish theft without slowing down Malaysia’s digital-economy ambitions,” he opined.