On Friday, a federal court docket to five years in prison for his involvement in the . Last month, the 24-year-old, often called PlugwalkJoe on-line, to a number of cyber crimes, together with finishing up a SIM-swapping assault that focused a TikTok account with tens of millions of followers. The 2020 Twitter hack noticed O’Conner and his co-perpetrators get hold of entry to the corporate’s backend and subsequently the accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama and greater than 100 different high-profile customers. O’Conner netted $794,000 in the crypto rip-off that adopted.
“After stealing and fraudulently diverting the stolen cryptocurrency, O’Connor and his co-conspirators laundered it by dozens of transfers and transactions and exchanged a few of it for Bitcoin utilizing cryptocurrency change providers,” the Justice Department stated. “Ultimately, a portion of the stolen cryptocurrency was deposited right into a cryptocurrency change account managed by O’Connor.” In 2021, Graham Ivan Clark, the alleged teenage mastermind behind the breach, in return for a three-year prison sentence. In addition to his five-year sentence, O’Conner additionally faces three years of supervised launch after his prison time period. He should additionally forfeit the $794,000 he defrauded throughout the hack.