Twitter hacker and crypto scammer sentenced to 5 years in jail

On Friday, a federal court docket to 5 years in jail for his involvement within the . Final month, the 24-year-old, often known as PlugwalkJoe on-line, to a bunch of cyber crimes, together with finishing up a SIM-swapping assault that focused a TikTok account with hundreds of thousands of followers. The 2020 Twitter hack noticed O’Conner and his co-perpetrators get hold of entry to the corporate’s backend and subsequently the accounts of Elon Musk, Invoice Gates, Barack Obama and greater than 100 different high-profile customers. O’Conner netted $794,000 within the crypto rip-off that adopted.

“After stealing and fraudulently diverting the stolen cryptocurrency, O’Connor and his co-conspirators laundered it by dozens of transfers and transactions and exchanged a few of it for Bitcoin utilizing cryptocurrency alternate companies,” the Justice Division mentioned. “In the end, a portion of the stolen cryptocurrency was deposited right into a cryptocurrency alternate account managed by O’Connor.” In 2021, Graham Ivan Clark, the alleged teenage mastermind behind the breach, in return for a three-year jail sentence. Along with his five-year sentence, O’Conner additionally faces three years of supervised launch after his jail time period. He should additionally forfeit the $794,000 he defrauded in the course of the hack.