(Yicai Global) March 18 -- A former Baidu engineer will need to spend three years in prison and pay a fine of CNY11,000 (USD1,568) after using the Chinese search engine giant's servers to mine cryptocurrencies. 

The convict will also have to return all the profits, some CNY100,000 (USD14,245) worth of sold Bitcoin, Monero, and others, a court ruling that was released today shows. The tokens were mined in the seven months ended July 2018 amid falling Bitcoin pricing.

In early July, the Beijing-based company started noticing that something was out of whack with its 155 servers that were inevitably running at lower speeds due to the crafty mining operations. 

The engineer had joined the tech firm in October 2016, about a year before Bitcoin reached its all-time high of USD20,000, based on CoinDesk data.

Editor: Emmi Laine