A guy in Iceland stole 600 Bitcoin mining rigs, broke out of prison and boarded a flight with the country's prime minister sitting on the same plane

Iceland's geothermal electricity was the cheapest in Europe, which made it the most profitable country on earth to mine Bitcoin
Massive data centers full of mining rigs went up along the south coast and the country became one of the biggest Bitcoin mining hubs in the world
Between December 2017 and January 2018, a man named Sindri Thor Stefansson and his crew of 6 hit four of those data centers in a series of break ins
His crew dressed in security uniforms and had inside help from a real security guard at one of the facilities
They walked out with 600 mining rigs, 600 graphics cards, 100 processors and 100 motherboards, almost $2 million in equipment in total
Icelandic media called it the Big Bitcoin Heist, the biggest theft in the country's history
Police arrested Stefansson in February 2018 along with 10 other suspects, including the inside man
They sent him to Sogn, a low security open prison about 60 miles from Keflavik International Airport
Sogn is the kind of prison where inmates keep their own cellphones, watch flat screen TVs and earn $4 an hour cleaning the prison's chicken coop
On April 17 2018, Stefansson sat in his cell, browsed flights on his phone and bought a ticket to Stockholm under another man's name
He climbed out a window, made his way to the airport and walked onto the plane without ever showing a passport because Iceland is part of Europe's borderless travel zone
The prime minister of Iceland was on the exact same flight, on her way to meet Indian leader Narendra Modi
From Stockholm, Stefansson took a train, a ferry and a taxi to keep moving across Europe
Police caught him a week later in Amsterdam
While he was waiting to get sent back, he gave an interview to the New York Times saying he actually wanted to go back to Iceland because in Amsterdam he was hungry all the time and felt threatened
A court sentenced him to four and a half years for the heist
His escape added zero days to his sentence because escaping prison is not a crime in Iceland
The 600 mining rigs were never found
Iceland later traced them all the way to China, where they're believed to still be running today, mining Bitcoin for whoever ended up with them