Sadly my day job is being a security analyst for a large Fortune 500 and I'm responsible for investigating attackers, theirs tools, bots, etc and sadly some of the most sophisticated pieces of auto spreading botnet malware is out there and readily available with instructions so a 13 year old can run a massive botnet capable of stealing creds and emptying accounts on any BTC or Alt crypto wallets, related site exchanges and pool sites as well as utilizing gpus for mining in the background quite effectively. I've seen some stuff out of russia recently that will actually hijack boxes mining with asics and simply reroute the work via dns to a stratum mitm server so everything looks good, except your stats on the site. I guess it would work with folks who don't constantly check on their miner shares.


BTC and Alt crypto mining is huge in the script kiddie botnet community and most have at least xpm or cpu coin miners these days. So yes, the smart scammers make quite a shit ton a day unless they get caught. Also sadly not common.


Anyway,
my 2 cents