British Hacker Joseph O’Connor, additionally identified on-line as PlugwalkJoe, has been sentenced to 5 years in U.S. jail for his position in stealing $794,000 price of cryptocurrency through a SIM swap assault on a crypto trade govt again in April 2019.
O’Connor was initially arrested in Spain in July 2021 and was extradited to the U.S. on April 26, 2023. In Could he pled responsible to a slew of fees referring to conspiracy to commit laptop intrusions, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit cash laundering, to call just a few.
plugwalkjoe is getting his sentence in 5 days, so it’s time to carry this gem again pic.twitter.com/OOBqD2FaFA
— rip @ironic (@ripironic) June 18, 2023
The jail sentence was highlighted in a June 23 assertion from the U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace of the Southern District of New York.
“Along with the jail time period, O’Connor was sentenced to 3 years of supervised launch. O’Connor was additional ordered to pay $794,012.64 in forfeiture,” the assertion reads.
The hacked crypto exec has not been named, nonetheless after SIM swapping them, O’Connor gained unauthorized entry to accounts and computing techniques belonging to the trade that the exec labored at.
“After stealing and fraudulently diverting the stolen cryptocurrency, O’Connor and his co-conspirators laundered it by means of dozens of transfers and transactions and exchanged a few of it for Bitcoin utilizing cryptocurrency trade providers.”
“In the end, a portion of the stolen cryptocurrency was deposited right into a cryptocurrency trade account managed by O’Connor,” the assertion provides.
O’Connor’s sentence additionally covers offenses referring to the main Twitter hack of July 2020, which finally fetched him and his crew round $120,000 price of ill-gotten crypto positive factors.
1/ Time for a narrative that mixes the craziness of crypto, the perils of hacking, and the results of shady actions. Buckle up as we discover the case of Joseph James O’Connor, aka PlugwalkJoe, the mastermind behind the notorious Twitter hack of July 2020!#Crypto
— Crypto Camel (@CamelChronicles) June 24, 2023
The hackers deployed a collection of “social engineering methods” and SIM-swapping assaults to hijack round 130 outstanding Twitter accounts, together with two massive accounts on TikTok and Snapchat.
“In some cases, the co-conspirators took management themselves and used that management to launch a scheme to defraud different Twitter customers. In different cases, the co-conspirators bought entry to Twitter accounts to others,” the assertion reads.
As a part of this scheme, O’Connor tried to blackmail the Snapchat sufferer by threatening to publicly launch non-public messages in the event that they didn’t make posts selling O’Connor’s on-line persona.
Moreover, O’Connor additionally “stalked and threatened” a sufferer, and “orchestrated a collection of swatting assaults” on them by falsely reporting emergencies to authorities.
SIM swaps are nonetheless an enormous problem
A SIM swap assault includes a nasty actor taking management of a sufferer’s telephone quantity by linking it to a different sim card managed by them.
In consequence, the dangerous actors can then re-route the sufferer’s calls and messages to a tool managed by them, and achieve entry to any accounts the sufferer makes use of SMS-based two-factor authentication on.
The scheme is mostly used to dupe followers of outstanding accounts into clicking phishing hyperlinks that finally find yourself swiping their crypto belongings.
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Regardless of O’Connor’s antics occurring roughly three years in the past, SIM swapping assaults proceed to be a major problem within the crypto sector.
Earlier this month blockchain sleuth ZachXBT recognized a bunch of scammers that SIM-swapped not less than eight accounts belonging to well-known figures in crypto, together with Pudgy Penguins founder Cole Villemain, DJ and NFT collector Steve Aoki and Bitcoin Journal editor Pete Rizzo.
In accordance with ZachXBT, the group stole virtually $1 million by selling phishing hyperlinks from the hacked accounts.
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