Asian Tech Press (Apr. 6) -- An employee of Chinese electric carmaker Nio Inc. (NYSE:NIO) has reportedly used the company's servers to illegally mine cryptocurrency for over a year.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the Nio employee surnamed Zhang started using the company's server resources to mine virtual currencies a year ago.

The person, who formerly served as a cluster server administrator at Nio, took advantage of his position to facilitate the use of the company's server computing resources to mine ethereum since February 2021.

The results of an internal investigation released by Nio on Wednesday showed that the employee confessed to his violations, the sources said.

Such mining using the company's servers also happened to another Chinese tech company Baidu Inc. in 2018.

An employee surnamed An from Baidu's search operation and maintenance department deployed a program he developed to the company's servers and used it to make a profit of more than 100,000 yuan.

At the time of his arrest, An's HASHWallet, an non-programmable hardware wallet, still had 1.4 Bitcoins.