Mexican federal prosecutors, the Navy and Puebla state police have seized 300 mining machines from a property in the Sierra Norte that was drawing electricity illegally from a federal hydroelectric complex, the state security ministry said on Sunday.

Alongside the rigs, officers took transformers, medium-voltage terminals and working satellite internet antennas from the site in Tlaola, a municipality of roughly 20,000 people. El País and Mexico News Daily describe the seized machines as GPUs, which would point away from Bitcoin and toward coins still mined on graphics cards.

While mining is legal in Mexico, prosecutors are preparing a charge of electricity theft.

Mining “consumes a great deal of energy and generates a lot of noise, which is why operators seek out isolated and very remote locations. That is what alerted us,” state security minister Francisco Sánchez told reporters. Investigators had tracked reports of illegal mining in the region because of its proximity to the Nuevo Necaxa dam, he said, adding that, “There was a very large power connection.”

Sánchez described the site as part of a network exploiting the Sierra Norte’s hydroelectric infrastructure, and said the same activity is happening in neighboring states, with searches extending to nearby municipalities.

Forensic accountants step in

Money laundering has not been ruled out. Forensic accountants are tracing who funded the hardware, per reports in local media, and the state government said it is examining whether assets produced there were used to launder proceeds of crime. Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission is taking part in the investigation.

The utility put non-technical losses from theft, meter tampering and illegal connections at 6,346 gigawatt hours between January and July 2024, worth about 13.8 billion pesos ($817 million).

Three other mining operations were dismantled across the state and neighboring Tlaxcala in 2025, and a farm found near the same dam last year was allegedly run out of properties belonging to the electrical workers’ union.

Mexico isn’t the only country wrestling with electricity theft by crypto miners, with similar raids taking place around the globe. Last year, Malaysian authorities seized more than 75,000 rigs over power theft its utility valued at $1.1 billion, and Brazilian police shut an illegal operation in Rio de Janeiro.