Well, they were stealing electricity for starters, that was a big mistake that led to their downfall. It's hard to tell from the article how large the operation was, but it appears to be significant in size. September 21st of this year, Ethereum switched from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) so this equipment can no longer be used to mine Ethereum. However, they could still be mining ETHW which is the forked version that remained as Proof of Work, but it's only worth $10 USD per coin compared to a real ETH worth like $1350 USD. There is the possibility they were mining some shit coin, like ravencoin or something like that. Maybe even Ethereum Classic.
I would never attempt to do something like that, first and foremost it's wrong, and electricity here in Argentina is so cheap anyhow, what cheap bastards, and 2nd, I don't know how long they thought they could get away with that for? areas are divided by grid, and there is a meter for each grid. If the total number of meters in that grid, don't come close to matching the grid meter something is wrong.
They impounded all of the equipment and a lot of cash. I doubt it was even close to all of it though, since most of it would have been in the form of crypto, and the chances they could get their hands on that is slim to none.
