They say that if you can't pay the fine, don't do the crime. One man is learning this the hard way, as a 26-year-old British citizen has been ordered to pay $5.4 million after he was found guilty of hijacking Elon Musk's Twitter account back in 2020.
Not just putting the world's richest man in his crosshairs, the hacker also targeted former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and many more.
Pleading guilty in the United States, 26-year-old Joseph James O’Connor was sentenced to five years in prison in 2023. Charges included computer intrusion, wire fraud, and extortion as he compromised over 130 celebrity accounts.
The United Kingdom's Crown Prosecution Service confirmed it has received an order to seize £4.1 million ($5.4 million), made from 42 Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency assets.
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O'Connor was arrested in Spain in 2021 and was later extradited when the High Court decided America was the best place to prosecute him due to the majority of the evidence and victims being there.
The Crown Prosecution Service worked with partners in the USA and Spain to ensure the accused couldn't hide his assets. Cheering the decision, Adrian Foster, Chief Crown Prosecutor for the CPS Proceeds of Crime Division, said: “Joseph James O’Connor targeted well known individuals and used their accounts to scam people out of their crypto assets and money.
“We were able to use the full force of the powers available to us to ensure that even when someone is not convicted in the UK, we are still able to ensure they do not benefit from their criminality.”
The crypto case comes after O'Connor was already slapped with a property freezing order that was applied during the extradition process.
O'Connor's attack was a widespread one that impacted the likes of billionaires, including Bill Gates and Kim Kardashian. It was such an issue for Twitter, the social media giant was forced to temporarily place restrictions on its verified accounts.
At the time, former CrowdStrike chief technology officer Dmitri Alperovitch referred to it as "the worst hack of a major social media platform yet." Experts were especially concerned that social media conversations could be swayed in the run-up to the 2020 United States presidential election.
The outbreak among celebrity accounts can be traced back to Musk's, with an initial tweet shared on July 15, reading: "I‘m feeling generous because of Covid-19. I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!”
This contained a Bitcoin address that was likely connected to the hacker's crypto wallet. As those behind Twitter suspected something was amiss, the hackers deleted the original post from the Musk account and replaced it with one that said: "Feeling grateful doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes."
The US Justice Department already said that O’Connor had been exploiting social media accounts while engaging in online extortion and cyberstalking, and while we imagine it could've been lucrative to use some of the richest people in the world to con others, it's a mistake that's cost him dearly.