Joseph James O’Connor, a U.K. citizen and one of the perpetrators of the 2020 Twitter hack, has been sentenced to five years in prison for his role in several cybercrime offenses.
According to a press release by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Judge Jed S. Rakoff sentenced O’Connor for two sets of charges: conspiracy to commit computer hacking and the theft of cryptocurrencies via a SIM swap attack; his role in the 2020 Twitter hack, cyberstalking two separate victims, and computer intrusions related to takeovers of TikTok and Snapchat user accounts.
O’Connor Lands Five-Year Jail Term
The 24-year-old convict was extradited from Spain on April 26, 2023, and he pled guilty to the charges brought against him on May 9, 2023. He was faced with a 20-year jail term or more.
Among his offenses, O’Connor used a SIM swap attack to steal bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Litecoin (LTC) worth $794,000 at the time from three executives in a Manhattan-based crypto company. The fraudulent scheme lasted from March to May 2019. The stolen assets are currently worth more than $1.6 million, and O’Connor, alongside his co-conspirators, laundered them through several crypto exchange accounts.
In addition, O’Connor participated in a range of crimes associated with exploiting TikTok and Snapchat accounts, online extortion, and cyberstalking between 2019 and 2020. On one occasion, O’Connor and his accomplices obtained unauthorized access to a public figure’s TikTok account with millions of followers and posted self-promotional messages, threatening to release sensitive materials to a designated group of individuals.
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O’Connor’s Role in the 2020 Twitter Hack
Furthermore, O’Connor participated in a massive 2020 Twitter hack that saw the accounts of top politicians and celebrities breached. Some victims include U.S. President Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Twitter accounts of major crypto companies and personalities like Binance, Bitfinex, Coinbase, Changpeng Zhao, and Justin Sun were affected. O’Connor and his cohorts also amassed over $118,000 in crypto through tweets about fake giveaways.
In addition to O’Connor’s prison term, he was sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay a forfeiture of $794,000.
Meanwhile, O’Connor’s partner and teenage mastermind of the Twitter hack, Graham Ivan Clark, is serving a three-year jail sentence in a juvenile prison after pleading guilty in March 2021.
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