A Liverpool man has been sentenced to five years in prison for high-level hacking activities that hijacked celebrity Twitter accounts to trick his followers.
Joseph O’Connor, aka “Plugwalk Joe”, was extradited from Spain to the United States on April 26 and pleaded guilty to two charges on May 9.
For more information about hacking Twitter accounts, see Three Arrested for Twitter VIP Account Hijacking.
One is related to mass hacking of social media accounts, online extortion, and cyberstalking.
In early 2020, O’Connor and his co-conspirators called some Twitter employees and social engineered them into handing over their login credentials, giving the hackers access to the site’s internal administrative tools.
According to the Department of Justice (DoJ), they used this access to expose bitcoin scams via over 130 celebrity Twitter accounts and also sold access to some accounts to third parties.
O’Connor also used SIM swap technology to access the account of top TikTok creator Addison Ray to publish self-promoting messages and videos to his millions of followers. He used similar techniques to hijack high-profile Snapchat accounts, steal sensitive images, and threaten to publish them.
A British man also carried out a series of slapping attacks against third parties in June and July 2020, threatening several family members of the victims.
Separately, O’Connor and his co-conspirators used a SIM swap attack to compromise three executives of a Manhattan-based cryptocurrency company and used their access to steal digital funds currently worth $1.6 million. was successfully diverted from their wallets.
He pleaded guilty to multiple counts of conspiracy to commit computer burglary, wire fraud, and money laundering, as well as computer burglary, two counts of extortion communications, and two counts of stalking and threatening communications.
O’Connor was sentenced to five years in prison, sentenced to three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay a forfeiture of $794,012.
