On the books of Malaysia’s national power utility TNB, a sizable shortfall has appeared: 4.6 billion ringgit, or about $1.11 billion.

The money was not stolen in the traditional sense. It was “mined” away.

According to information released by the Ministry of Energy on Nov. 19, nearly 14,000 locations across the country were involved in illegal cryptocurrency mining between 2020 and August 2025.

Bitcoin was the main draw. These mining sites were well hidden, some inside urban apartment blocks, others in rural factory buildings. Operators kept them running by tampering with meter readings or illegally tapping power lines. The theft has grown into a full black-market supply chain, with clear divisions of labor: technicians handle equipment procurement and wiring, while site owners provide locations that are hard to detect.

More seriously, insiders at power companies have allegedly acted as informants and leaked information. Monthly earnings of hundreds of thousands of dollars have been a powerful incentive, helping illegal crypto mining activity surge fourfold in just five years.

Ordinary people are ultimately paying the price for those losses.

To close the gap, Malaysia raised residential electricity prices twice in two years, for a cumulative increase of 8%. The $1.11 billion loss is equivalent to 0.3% of the country’s 2024 gross national product.

That is not a small sum. It would be enough to cover a full year of electricity costs for 3 million households. Regulators are still trying to catch up. Although Malaysia introduced a compliance framework for crypto mining in 2025, requiring companies to register and use renewable energy before they can operate.

But legislation specifically targeting illegal mining remains absent, leaving enforcement agencies to rely on the Electricity Supply Act when pursuing accountability. Several departments have already launched joint actions, destroying mining rigs worth more than 1 million ringgit and arresting 237 people, 53 of whom were sent to prison.

TNB is trying to use technology to plug the gaps. The company is building a database of suspicious sites to track tenants and installing smart meters at substations to monitor abnormal power use. But the enforcement challenge has not changed: illegal mining sites keep reappearing, and the problem is increasingly intertwined with money laundering, tax evasion and other offenses.

When the enormous computing power behind cryptocurrency runs straight into blind spots in institutional design, who ultimately pays the price?

Companies? Ordinary citizens? Or the rules themselves, which are clearly lagging behind?

Malaysia is not the only country that needs to answer that question.