A British national was given a five-year prison term in the United States for his role in the huge Twitter hack in July 2020. In the Southern District of New York, just over a month after pleading guilty, 24-year-old Joseph James O’Connor (aka PlugwalkJoe) was given his sentence. In July of 2021, he was apprehended in Spain.
Due to the infamous Twitter hack, the defendant and his accomplices were able to gain access to Twitter’s backend tools and use them to hijack 130 popular accounts, resulting in unlawful revenues of almost $120,000.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) stated that “in other instances, the co-conspirators sold access to Twitter accounts to others.” According to the indictment, “O’Connor communicated with others regarding purchasing unauthorized access to a variety of Twitter accounts, including accounts associated with public figures from around the world.”
The defendant has also been charged with planning SIM swapping assaults to gain access to Snapchat and TikTok accounts, and in one case, he was accused of attempting to rob a New York-based cryptocurrency exchange of over $794,000 worth of cryptocurrencies.
The infamous twitter crypto scam
The Department of Justice claims that after stealing and illegally diverting the Stolen Cryptocurrency, O’Connor and his co-conspirators “laundered” it through numerous transfers and transactions, eventually exchanging some of it for Bitcoin through online cryptocurrency exchanges.
At the end of the day, some of the stolen cryptocurrency ended up in an exchange account that O’Connor managed.
O’Connor is also accused of cyberstalking two people, one of whom was a minor, in June and July of 2020, falsely reporting that the victim had made threats to shoot people in an effort to provoke a police response.
After serving his prison time, O’Connor will be subject to three years of supervised release due to his admission that his actions amounted to “stupid and pointless,” as reported by TechCrunch. In addition, he must forfeit $794,000 in court.
To read our article about “50 Chinese arrested in Libya as their crypto mining exposed” click here.
