Russian Scammers Offer Mining Firmware Upgrade For Asics

An offer that no one seems to be able to refuse, is offered by a team of “Russian developers” (Scammers). These “developers” say they have created an upgraded firmware for Αsic devices that do bitcoin mining.

This software claims to increase machine performance by 20-30%. They even offer to sell this software to companies that own bitcoin mining hardware in order to hijack the upgrade so that companies gain the difference in processing power from the upgrade.

This was included in the message our team received:

We are a team of software developers , we have created firmware for Antminer S9, T9+,L3+ that increase profitability by 20-30%

We can create for your company an affiliate version of the firmware , which will be your logo or native Bitmine , included your % dev fee (Client ASIC will mine on you), this % will be hidden in the program

For example, Asic on native firmware from Bitmain
S9 13.5 TH/s – 1300 watts
On ours :
15 TH/s – 1300 watts

You can take the 1.5 Th/s with the client ASIC, while the pool of customers will see the same Hashrate he was

1,5 Th/s with 1000 ASICS – 15000$ per month , your volume is good money

Their also claim they have this firmware upgrade on 300.000 devices and that they work with many hosting companies in various countries.

Now the firmware is on 300 000 devices. We work with many Hosting companies around the world( Georgia , USA , Canada , China , Kazakhstan , Russia, Ukraine and others)

Scammers On The Rise

First of all, if this firmware upgrade is true and companies already using it to hide the 20-30% performance gain, this cannot be hidden from bitcoin’s total hashing power.

In other words something like that would have made a huge fuss which it didn’t.

In the end, is is a scammer’s “brilliant” plan to somehow infect computers of even huge mining networks.