TL;DR:
- A federal grand jury in New York indicted Ryan James Roach and Mathiew James Stubbings for conspiracy, information theft, and intentional damage to protected systems.
- The intrusions spanned from June 2016 to December 2019, affecting supercomputers at universities in New York, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Massachusetts.
- Authorities reported damage to at least ten protected systems with losses exceeding $5,000, carrying potential penalties of up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.
Two Canadian citizens are facing federal criminal charges in the United States after being accused of breaching university computing infrastructure to mine cryptocurrency without authorization between 2016 and 2019.
The U.S. Department of Justice formalized charges against Ryan James Roach, 35, a resident of Saskatchewan, and Mathiew James Stubbings, 41, originally from Ontario. Both individuals are named in an indictment returned by a federal grand jury in the Western District of New York. Prosecutors charge them with conspiracy to access protected computers and cause damage, credential theft, and intentional damage to computer systems.
According to the case file, the unlawful activity continued uninterrupted over the course of more than three years. The defendants allegedly targeted higher education institutions located in the states of New York, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Massachusetts. These campuses were selected due to the presence of academic supercomputers equipped with high-performance computing power.
The investigation reveals that the defendants identified vulnerabilities within educational networks instead of funding the acquisition of specialized hardware or purchasing legitimate computing power. By deploying malicious software, they compromised access terminals and stole legitimate operating credentials to transfer them to servers under their external control.
To conceal the origin of their connections, the attackers routed digital traffic through virtual private servers (VPS) leased across various jurisdictions using false records and aliases. Likewise, they used previously compromised workstations within the same campus to move laterally and evade detection by internal security teams.
Once control of the machines was established, automated mining programs were executed to divert processing resources toward generating digital assets. Canadian court records specify that the mined asset was Electroneum, a token focused at the time on decentralized mining. Court filings estimate that the attack damaged ten or more protected computers during a twelve-month period, exceeding $5,000 in direct losses associated with resource degradation.
Extradition and judicial precedents in U.S. territory
On October 28, Roach was extradited from Canada to U.S. territory. The defendant appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark W. Pedersen in Rochester, New York, pleading not guilty to the charges brought against him. Meanwhile, extradition proceedings concerning Stubbings remain ongoing before Canadian courts.
The technical investigation was coordinated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), while Assistant U.S. Attorney Meghan K. McGuire leads the prosecution in the district court. Under the federal legal framework applicable to wire fraud offenses and damage to protected infrastructure, the charges carry a cumulative maximum penalty of ten years in federal prison and fines of up to $250,000.
This prosecution adds to several criminal enforcement actions undertaken by the U.S. justice system throughout 2026 linked to the crypto ecosystem. In October, prosecutors brought three counts of wire fraud against Alexander Sisemore for the undisclosed retention and sale of token supplies from Kishu Inu. Similarly, in May 2026, the extradition of Olena Oblamska from Thailand was finalized for her alleged connection to the $340 million Forsage investment scheme.
Judicial authorities emphasized that the charges filed constitute solely formal accusations by the prosecution. Both defendants maintain the presumption of innocence until a final verdict is determined. The federal court in Rochester is scheduled to hold Roach’s detention hearing in the coming days.
