$794K SIM swap hacker PlugwalkJoe sentenced to 5 years in prison

British Hacker Joseph O’Connor, additionally identified on-line as PlugwalkJoe, has been sentenced to 5 years in a United States jail for his function in stealing $794,000 worth of cryptocurrency by way of a SIM swap assault on a crypto alternate govt 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 Might, he pled responsible to a slew of prices referring to conspiracy to commit laptop intrusions, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit cash laundering — to call a number of.

plugwalkjoe is getting his sentence in 5 days, so it’s time to convey 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 for the Southern District of New York.

“Along with the jail time period, O’Connor was sentenced to a few 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 alternate the place the exec labored.

“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.”

“In the end, a portion of the stolen cryptocurrency was deposited right into a cryptocurrency alternate 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 in the end fetched him and his crew round $120,000 price of ill-gotten crypto beneficial properties.

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 distinguished 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 offered 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 cellphone quantity by linking it to a different sim card managed by them.

In consequence, the dangerous actors can re-route the sufferer’s calls and messages to a tool managed by them, getting access to any accounts for which the sufferer makes use of SMS-based two-factor authentication.

The scheme is mostly used to dupe followers of distinguished accounts into clicking phishing hyperlinks that in the end find yourself swiping their crypto belongings.

Associated: Darknet hackers are selling crypto accounts for as low as $30 a pop

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 identified a group of scammers that SIM-swapped no 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.

Based on ZachXBT, the group stole virtually $1 million by selling phishing hyperlinks from the hacked accounts.

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