Mexico Seizes 300 Bitcoin Mining Rigs in Puebla Power-Theft Raid

300 Rigs Seized in Puebla

Mexican authorities have shut down a large illegal cryptocurrency mining operation in Tlaola, a mountain municipality in northern Puebla state, that allegedly siphoned electricity from infrastructure connected to a federal hydroelectric complex. The raid netted roughly 300 purpose-built mining computers along with transformers, medium-voltage equipment and active satellite internet antennas — a hardware haul that, in our review of the operation's disclosures, points well beyond a hobbyist setup. Investigators are examining whether the site was tapped illicitly into the grid tied to the Nuevo Necaxa hydroelectric dam. Officials said earlier tips about suspicious movement around the dam led them to detect the abnormal electrical connection. The probe is no longer confined to Tlaola: authorities are checking whether similar facilities operate in nearby municipalities and neighboring states. Two questions remain open. First, examiners have not determined which crypto assets the machines were producing — proof-of-work mining, the process that validates Bitcoin transactions by burning intensive compute and electricity, leaves the target coin unconfirmed here. Second, prosecutors are assessing whether the activity was linked to money laundering. The operation is the fourth of its kind in the region this year: officials dismantled three separate mining setups in 2025 across the Puebla area and neighboring Tlaxcala. The pattern is not local. Official data from Malaysia's energy ministry show national utility Tenaga Nasional lost roughly $1.11 billion to electricity theft tied to mining between 2020 and August 2025, and in the United States, police in Massachusetts found an unauthorized mining rig in a narrow crawl space beneath Cohasset Middle High School. Remote sites chosen to dodge noise and scrutiny, the Puebla case shows, are a distinct audit blind spot.

Orionx Halts Withdrawals

Separately, Chilean exchange Orionx entered permanent wind-down on September 3 after an internal forensic audit found that more than $7 million of customer assets had been moved to wallets outside the company's control. The firm halted withdrawals at the same time, arguing the freeze prevents early movers from recovering funds while later claimants are left with nothing. More than 100,000 registered users are affected, and no repayment date has been set. The regulatory picture is unusually bleak: Chile's Financial Market Commission (CMF) says it has no supervisory role over the liquidation and no power to order asset restitution. The CMF had rejected Orionx's registration and authorization application on June 19 under the fintech law, citing the company's failure to demonstrate the collateral required of approved operators. Until that rejection, Orionx kept operating on the basis that its application was under review — after which it was limited to shrinking existing business rather than taking on new regulated activity. In effect, the company held assets for more than 100,000 users in a gap where it was neither a registered operator nor a licensed one. Orionx filed a criminal complaint against former management on September 2 and reported the asset movements to prosecutors; two co-founders deny wrongdoing. The company's own wind-down tracker, which we reviewed, still sits at stage 1 of 5 — restitution cannot begin until account balances are reconciled and a distribution plan is approved, leaving users with the company's own procedure or the courts. The case resonates beyond Chile: venues operating under separation-of-custody and cold-storage standards, as regulated platforms such as Coinbase do, face tighter guardrails, and Japan's shift of exchange oversight to securities-law discipline during 2027 aims to close similar gaps — though transition periods create their own exposure. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on MEXC.

Infrastructure Gaps in Focus

Taken together, the two cases expose the same weakness on different layers of crypto infrastructure: physical power and custodial assets both leak when oversight is thin. The most load-bearing primary records here are the company's own disclosures — Orionx's official announcement of the forensic audit, the criminal complaint and the stage-1 tracker — and Malaysia's national utility data quantifying $1.11 billion in mining-related theft losses. Our reading is that enforcement will increasingly chase the electricity meter rather than the blockchain: mining secures Bitcoin's base layer and its growing Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem alike, and when grid theft inflates margins, operators either formalize or go underground. Custody remains the sharper consumer risk — an unlicensed venue's users, unlike stolen power, rarely recover value.