JAKARTA A man named Joseph James O'Connor has pleaded guilty to the alleged hacking on Twitter in 2020. He goes by the pseudonym Plugwalk Joe has stolen a $794,000 crypto asset from a SIM Swap company located in Manhattan. The theft was carried out in 2020.
On April 26, 2023, the British man was extradited from Spain to the United States. O'Connor pleaded guilty to a number of charges alleged against him.
US prosecutors stated that OConnor had lost the stolen funds and planned to pay compensation to the victims. He was also charged with hacking TikTok and Twitter accounts to launch his action, namely the promotion of a crypto fraud scheme. For his actions, OConnor was faced with a maximum sentence of 77 years.
Damian Williams, US prosecutor, denounced O'Connor's actions and called him an "evil exploit" by committing a criminal act to attack SIM Swap in carrying out his actions. One of the victims of hacking Twitter accounts and TikTok is minors.
"Joseph O'Connor, a/a "Plugwalk Joe," used his advanced technological capabilities for malicious purposes - carrying out complicated SIM exchange attacks to steal large amounts of cryptocurrencies, hacking Twitter, infiltrating computers to take over social media accounts, and even stalking two victims, including minors, said US Attorney Damian Williams.
O'Connor's crimes included hacking of verified Twitter accounts belonging to Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Joe Biden, a presidential candidate at the time. Reuters reported that Barack Obama's Twitter account, Bill Gates, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, and Michael Bloomberg were also affected.
OConnor took advantage of these millions of followers' social media accounts to ask for cryptocurrencies. This condition forced Twitter to stop publishing messages from these profiles for several hours until the accounts were thoroughly cleaned and secured.
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