A US citizen, a UK participant in the massive Twitter hack in July 2020, has been sentenced to five years in prison.
Joseph James O’Connor (aka PlugWalkJoe), 24, was sentenced in the Southern District of New York on Friday, a little more than a month after pleading guilty to criminal schemes. He was arrested in Spain in July 2021.
The infamous Twitter breach allowed the defendants and their co-conspirators to gain unauthorized access to backend tools used by Twitter, abusing which they hijacked 130 popular accounts to conduct a crypto scam, netting them approximately $120,000.
“In other cases, co-conspirators sold access to Twitter accounts to others,” the US Department of Justice (DOJ) said. “O’Connor communicated with others in connection with the procurement of unauthorized access to various Twitter accounts, including accounts associated with public figures around the world.”
The defendants are also accused of carrying out SIM swapping attacks to gain control of users’ Snapchat and TikTok accounts and, in one case, of stealing crypto worth approximately $794,000 at the time from a New York-based cryptocurrency company.
“After stealing and fraudulently diverting the stolen cryptocurrency, O’Connor and his co-conspirators laundered it through dozens of transfers and transactions and exchanged some of it for bitcoin using cryptocurrency exchange services,” the DOJ said.
“Ultimately, a portion of the stolen cryptocurrency was deposited into a cryptocurrency exchange account controlled by O’Connor.”
The list of crimes committed by O’Connor also includes cyberstalking two victims, including a minor, in June and July 2020, falsely claiming that the person was threatening to shoot people in an attempt to provoke a law enforcement response Had been.
According to TechCrunch O’Connor, who said his crimes were “stupid and pointless”, will also face three years of supervised release after serving his prison sentence. He has also been ordered to forfeit $794,000.
