The Infamous Twitter Hacker Charged With Crypto Theft Worth $784,000

The Infamous Twitter hacker from 2019 was charged with cryptocurrency theft worth more than $700,000 as we are reading more today in our latest cryptocurrency news.

Joseph James O’Connor, one of the hackers in the Infamous twitter hack last year, was charged with another crime that involves the theft of $784,000 worth of crypto in a SIM swapping scam. The reprots show that the US prosecutors in Manhattan said that the fraudulent scheme that ran for a few months in 2019 saw the 22-year old and his accomplices targeting three crypto company executives.

The prosecutors noted that after the accused conducted the SIM swap, they managed to steal BTC, LTC, and ETH from two clients and laundered it all. The charges leveled against O’Connor and his gang include identity theft, conspiracies to commit money laundering, computer hacking, wire fraud, and more. If convicted, the accused will likely spend more than 20 years in jail. The Infamous Twitter hacker was arrested in July 2021, for his involvement in the hack of top politicians and celebrities’ Twitter accounts. Some of the most popular names that got their accounts hacked included president Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. The incident affected accounts belonging to other entities as well like Binance, Bitfinex, Changpeng Zhao, and Coinbase.

O’Connor referred to as PlugWalkJoe and his group gathered over $118,000 in BTC from victims after tweeting about a fake giveaway. While he was still in detention in Spain and awaiting extradition to the US, his partner and mastermind behind the hack Graham Ivan Clark, pleaded guilty in a Florida court and will serve three years in the juvenile detention center. Through SIM Swapping, the scammers are able to transfer a victim’s phone number to another device with the goal of accessing all associated accounts.

With the technology evolving, there were plenty of reports of SIM swap hacks with the scammers using the means to get away with millions of dollars over the years. One of the biggest SIM Swapping scams in history happened in 2020 when an anonymous hacker stole $45 million in Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin from a whale investor.

As recently reported, Prosecutors charged Clark with multiple felony counts including several counts of communications fraud, organized fraud, fraudulent use of personal information, and accessing computers with no authority. Both the Twitter hacker and his attorney David Weisbrod affirmed that all of the stolen cryptocurrencies were turned over to the officials for restitution. He also agreed to unlimited searchers and will also provide unlimited access to his electronic devices for supervising.