Hackers who stole cryptocurrency from dozens of people by faking SIM cards were sentenced to only two years

Two men from Massachusetts have been sentenced to two years in prison each for stealing at least $ 330,000 in cryptocurrency, SIM swap attacks, and hijacking victims' social media accounts.

Eric Maggs and Declan Harrington were arrested back in 2019. They were charged with 11 counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, computer fraud and abuse, and aggravated identity theft. At the time, both pleaded guilty to stealing cryptocurrency and hacking into the victims' social media accounts.

Maggs and Harrington were engaged in so-called SIM swapping attacks. The essence of such attacks is that the criminal contacts representatives of the victim’s cellular operator and uses social engineering. For example, pretending to be the real owner of the number, the attacker claims to have lost or broken the SIM card and asks for the number to be transferred to a new SIM card. The fraudster then hacks into accounts linked to the phone number.

The investigation reported that the victims of Maggs and Harrington were mainly the heads of cryptocurrency companies, as well as users who had a significant amount of cryptocurrency in wallets on Coinbase or Block.io. In addition, fraudsters were interested in the owners of particularly «valuable» accounts on Instagram and Tumblr.

Maggs and Harrington faced up to 20 years in prison for each charge of wire fraud alone, and each episode of aggravated identity theft carried an additional 2 years in prison.

As a result, taking into account the guilty pleas and other circumstances, this week Maggs and Harrington were sentenced to only two years and one day in prison and two years and seven days in prison, respectively.

As a reminder, in the UK, a hacker who stole unreleased songs by musicians, including Ed Sheeran, was sentenced to 18 months behind bars.