Two Massachusetts males have been sentenced on Wednesday for utilizing SIM-swapping and different hacking methods to steal cryptocurrencies in addition to controlling victims’ social media accounts.
In line with a press launch from the Division of Justice, 24-year-old Eric Meiggs and 22-year-old Declan Harrington focused executives of cryptocurrency exchanges, who’ve a excessive likelihood of holding numerous cryptos. As well as, they focused high-value social media profiles.
The perpetrators illegally took management of the web accounts of the victims for stealing high-value issues like cryptocurrencies . They allegedly siphoned round $330,000 in cryptocurrencies from no less than ten victims.
For the crimes, Meiggs has been sentenced to 2 years and someday in jail, whereas Harrington has been imprisoned for 2 years and 7 days.
An Notorious Hacking Approach
SIM-swapping is an notorious approach utilized by criminals to realize management of victims’ cellphone numbers and thus entry on-line accounts.
“In ‘SIM swapping’, cybercriminals persuade a sufferer’s mobile phone provider to reassign the sufferer’s mobile phone quantity from the SIM card (Subscriber Identification Module card) contained in the sufferer’s mobile phone to the SIM card inside a mobile phone managed by the cybercriminals,” the Division of Justice defined.
“Cybercriminals then pose because the sufferer with a web based account supplier and request that the supplier ship account password-reset hyperlinks or an authentication code to the SIM-swapped machine now managed by the cybercriminals. The cybercriminals can then reset the sufferer’s account log-in credentials and use the log-in credentials to entry the sufferer’s account with out authorization, or ‘hack into’ the account.”
A number of cell carriers in the USA have additionally confronted lawsuits by the victims of SIM swappings. Regardless of many precautions by telecom operators, such scams are very exhausting to stop.
Earlier this 12 months, YouTube accounts of a number of crypto influencers have been compromised utilizing SIM-swapping. Nonetheless, that incident solely resulted in promotions of scams and didn’t end in a high-value theft.
Two Massachusetts males have been sentenced on Wednesday for utilizing SIM-swapping and different hacking methods to steal cryptocurrencies in addition to controlling victims’ social media accounts.
In line with a press launch from the Division of Justice, 24-year-old Eric Meiggs and 22-year-old Declan Harrington focused executives of cryptocurrency exchanges, who’ve a excessive likelihood of holding numerous cryptos. As well as, they focused high-value social media profiles.
The perpetrators illegally took management of the web accounts of the victims for stealing high-value issues like cryptocurrencies . They allegedly siphoned round $330,000 in cryptocurrencies from no less than ten victims.
For the crimes, Meiggs has been sentenced to 2 years and someday in jail, whereas Harrington has been imprisoned for 2 years and 7 days.
An Notorious Hacking Approach
SIM-swapping is an notorious approach utilized by criminals to realize management of victims’ cellphone numbers and thus entry on-line accounts.
“In ‘SIM swapping’, cybercriminals persuade a sufferer’s mobile phone provider to reassign the sufferer’s mobile phone quantity from the SIM card (Subscriber Identification Module card) contained in the sufferer’s mobile phone to the SIM card inside a mobile phone managed by the cybercriminals,” the Division of Justice defined.
“Cybercriminals then pose because the sufferer with a web based account supplier and request that the supplier ship account password-reset hyperlinks or an authentication code to the SIM-swapped machine now managed by the cybercriminals. The cybercriminals can then reset the sufferer’s account log-in credentials and use the log-in credentials to entry the sufferer’s account with out authorization, or ‘hack into’ the account.”
A number of cell carriers in the USA have additionally confronted lawsuits by the victims of SIM swappings. Regardless of many precautions by telecom operators, such scams are very exhausting to stop.
Earlier this 12 months, YouTube accounts of a number of crypto influencers have been compromised utilizing SIM-swapping. Nonetheless, that incident solely resulted in promotions of scams and didn’t end in a high-value theft.
