A British man who hacked high profile Twitter – now known as X – accounts as part of a Bitcoin scam has been ordered to hand over £4.1m in stolen cryptocurrency.
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 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 – which eventually granted them access to the social media site’s administrative tools.
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.
Thousands were duped into believing that a crypto giveaway was real.
Between 15 and 16 July 2020, 426 transfers were made to the scammers of various amounts from people hoping to double their money.
A total of over 12.86 BTC was stolen which at the time was worth around $110,000 (£83,500). It is now worth $1.2m.
The UK’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said investigators believed more crypto linked to O’Connor was obtained through criminal hacks he carried out with other teenagers and young people he met whilst playing Call of Duty online.
The CPS has recovered 42 Bitcoin and other digital currency in total from him.
Adrian Foster, Chief Crown Prosecutor for the CPS Proceeds of Crime Division, said O’Connor “targeted well known individuals and used their accounts to scam people out of their crypto assets and money”.
“Even when someone is not convicted in the UK, we are still able to ensure they do not benefit from their criminality,” he said.
