The article says why the fraudster was sentenced: "The fraudster had been sentenced to more than two years in jail for covertly installing software on other computers to harness their power to mine or produce bitcoin."
I knew an IT tech at a school district I worked at who did this back in the early days of BTC. He had 3 schools under his care which totaled around 1500 PCs. He built a custom image that had a hidden mining pool running, and over the summer he reimaged the computer labs first, then for every issue that cropped up on non-lab PCs, he would install his hidden pool on those too.
I'm not sure how many BTC he eventually mined, or if he ever wiped the mining pool off the PCs, but 10 years later, I know he has close to a $1M in various cryptos, so maybe he made out like a bandit.
That sounds pretty innocent. Normally that computing power is consumed by bloatware. Two years for stealing computing power from bloatware? That's excessive.
I'm not sure how many BTC he eventually mined, or if he ever wiped the mining pool off the PCs, but 10 years later, I know he has close to a $1M in various cryptos, so maybe he made out like a bandit.