"Joseph O'Connor, from Liverpool, hijacked more than 130 accounts in July 2020, including those of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Elon Musk. The 26-year-old fled to Spain where his mother lives before being arrested and extradited to the US for trial. He was sentenced to five years for cyber crimes and was released in 2025, but now must hand over a haul of crypto he gathered through various hacks and scams."
"O'Connor, who went by the alias PlugwalkJoe, carried out the so-called "giveaway scam" with other young men and teenagers - breaking into Twitter's internal systems and taking over high profile accounts. Three other hackers have been charged over the scam, with US teenager Graham Clark pleading guilty to his part in the deception in 2021. The hackers gained access to the accounts by first convincing a small number of Twitter employees to hand over their internal login details."
"They used social engineering tricks to get access to the powerful internal control panel at the site. Once inside the Twitter accounts of famous individuals, they pretended to be the celebrities and tweeted asking followers to send Bitcoin to various digital wallets promising to double their money. As a result of the fraud, an estimated 350 million Twitter users viewed suspicious tweets from official accounts of some of the platform's biggest users, including Apple, Uber, Kanye West and Bill Gates."
Joseph O'Connor hijacked more than 130 Twitter accounts in July 2020, including those of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Elon Musk. He and accomplices used social engineering to convince a small number of Twitter employees to hand over internal login details, gaining access to administrative tools and the internal control panel. The group impersonated celebrities to post Bitcoin giveaway tweets promising to double payments, which an estimated 350 million users saw. Between 15 and 16 July 2020, attackers received 426 transfers totaling over 12.86 BTC (about $110,000 at the time). O'Connor was arrested, extradited to the US, jailed for five years, released in 2025, and ordered to hand over 4.1m in stolen cryptocurrency.
Read at www.bbc.com
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