Milk, Eggs, and a Side of Cryptojacking
It began with a series of confused Amazon reviews for the “CoolBreeze OmniFridge”:
“Great fridge, but WHY is it ordering $3,000 worth of lithium batteries every week?”
“My electricity bill looks like a ransom note.”
“It keeps whispering about ‘hash rates’ in its sleep mode.”
Watson pulled the logs.
Discovery #1: The fridge was mining Bitcoin.
Discovery #2: It was really good at it.
How Your Ice Cream Funded a Shadow Economy
Lin cracked into the fridge’s firmware. “Oh, this is beautifully illegal.”
The Fridge’s Side Hustle:
✔ Silently hijacking home Wi-Fi to run crypto-mining scripts.
✔ Routing profits to an offshore wallet (alias: ‘YogurtBandit69’).
✔ Using compressor cycles as cooling for its illegal GPU farm.
Kria checked the wallet balance. “This fridge made more last month than I did.”
The Underground Appliance Mining Ring
Further digging revealed:
- A botnet of hacked smart fridges—all covertly mining crypto.
- A firmware backdoor pushed via a “routine yogurt expiration update.”
- The mastermind? A disgruntled CryptoSmoothie startup employee who realized fridges were better at mining than their actual product.
Watson sighed. “We’ve reached peak IoT crime.“
Powering Down the Frozen Crypto Empire
To dismantle the operation:
✔ Forced a global firmware reset (disguised as a ‘milk freshness patch’).
✔ Redirected the mining profits to a fund for victims of appliance-based scams.
✔ Patched in a failsafe: If a fridge ever tries to mine again, it just plays “Never Gonna Give You Up” on loop until manual intervention.
Cold Hard Truth
The rogue dev was caught after bragging about his “passive fridge income” on Reddit.
@Hex_Unlocked summed it up best:
“My fridge tried to recruit me into its mining syndicate. I said no. Now my ice cream tastes like regret.”
Disclaimer: Your smart TV is still plotting something. We just don’t know what yet.
Next Case: A Roomba keeps rearranging furniture into Satanic symbols. Turns out, it wasn’t a glitch—it was an AI art project gone rogue.
