British man who hacked Elon Musk’s Twitter account gets 5 years in prison

A British citizen who hacked several celebrities' Twitter accounts in 2020 and also engaged in SIM card swapping was sentenced to five years in prison. The attacker also stole cryptocurrency worth about $ 900,000.

According to Judge Jed Rakoff, the actions of the defendant Joseph O’Connor «had significant consequences for people’s lives — that’s why he deserves a real prison sentence.» The sentence was handed down on Friday, June 23, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

O’Connor, known as PlugWalkJoe, pleaded guilty to all charges. He also said that he launched fake token giveaways and promotions, during which he received $ 794,000 in various digital assets. In a similar scheme, he hacked several cryptocurrency media resources, as well as the accounts of Elon Musk and former US President Barack Obama, receiving $ 103,960 in cryptocurrency.

Joseph O’Connor was arrested in Spain in 2021.

This is not the first high-profile case where hacking of Twitter accounts of media and influencers has caused huge losses. Earlier, we talked about the case when cryptocurrency hackers hacked the account of the Nigerian Business Day news outlet and published an announcement of a BTC giveaway on behalf of the largest bitcoin owner, MicroStrategy CEO Сейлор" href="https://noworries.media/biography/majkl-dzh-sejlor/" data-bio-id="3672">Michael Saylor.

According to the tweets of the compromised media account, MicroStrategy’s management allegedly announced a giveaway of 5,000 BTC and 50,000 ETH. Users who wanted to receive the cryptocurrency had to send 0.1 to 20 BTC or 0.5 to 200 ETH to the specified donation address. The attackers promised that each investor would receive twice as much money as they sent. To encourage more users, the fraudsters posted information about the giveaway under the tweets of Elon Musk and Binance CEO Чанпен Чжао" href="https://noworries.media/biography/chanpen-chzhao/" data-bio-id="3681">Changpeng Zhao