A United Kingdom man who was earlier charged in the US for links to hacking celebrities' and politicians' Twitter accounts was recently arrested for stealing cryptocurrency worth $784,000 of cryptocurrency. Prosecutors in Manhattan, US said that Joseph James O'Connor (age 22) along with his partners stole Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum, after getting access to target's cellphone no. by linking it to SIM cards.
O Connor, aka PlugwalkJoe, along with his partners orchestrated a SIM swapping attack targeting three Manhattan cryptocurrency company executives, stealing cryptocurrency from two clients, while laundering it. O Connor's lawyer isn't yet known. As per the prosecutors, the campaign ran from March 2019 to May 2019. O'Connor awaits possible extradition from Spain after the July arrest concerned with a last year's July hack which compromised several Twitter accounts and stole around $118,000 worth of Bitcoins.
"It named the British man as Joseph James O'Connor and said he faced multiple charges. He was also accused in a criminal complaint of computer intrusions related to takeovers of TikTok and Snapchat accounts, including one incident involving sextortion, as well as cyberstalking a 16-year-old juvenile," reported Reuters earlier in July. These hacked accounts include current US president Joe Biden, former president Barack Obama, Ex Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Kim Kardashian, Elon Musk, and rapper Kanye West (currently known as Ye).
The accused teenager, Graham Ivan Clark, the mastermind behind the Twitter hack, pleaded guilty in March in state court of Florida and is currently serving three years in a juvenile prison. The latest charges against Connor consist of money laundering and conspiracies to commit wire fraud, carrying a minimum of 20 years prison sentence, along with aggravated identity theft and computer hacking conspiracy.
Reuters reports, "the alleged hacker used the accounts to solicit digital currency, prompting Twitter to take the extraordinary step of preventing some verified accounts from publishing messages for several hours until security to the accounts could be restored."
