British Hacker Sentenced For Cryptocurrency Theft.

Joseph O’Connor, also known as PlugwalkJoe, a British hacker, was given a five-year prison sentence in the U.S. for stealing $794,000 in cryptocurrency. He took over the phone of an executive from a cryptocurrency exchange in April 2019.

He was arrested in Spain in 2021, and later brought to the U.S. in April 2023. In May, he admitted to several crimes, like computer hacking, wire fraud, and money laundering.

This news came from a statement on June 23 by the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York. After prison, O’Connor will be watched for three years and must pay back $794,012.64.

After taking over the unnamed executive's phone, O’Connor got into the exchange's accounts and systems. He and his group stole and hid the cryptocurrency by making many transactions and trading some for Bitcoin.

The sentence also considers O’Connor's part in the Twitter hack of July 2020. He and others hijacked around 130 important Twitter accounts as well as two large TikTok and Snapchat accounts. They either controlled the accounts themselves or sold access to them.

He also threatened a Snapchat user, saying he would share private messages unless they promoted O’Connor online. Plus, O’Connor scared and threatened another person, and made false emergency calls to the police about them.

SIM swap attacks are still a big problem. In a SIM swap, a hacker gets control of a person's phone number by linking it to a SIM card they have. They can then get the person's calls and messages, and get into accounts using SMS-based two-factor authentication.

Even though O’Connor was caught, SIM swapping is still happening a lot in the cryptocurrency world. Earlier this month, a group of scammers were found who SIM-swapped at least eight accounts of famous people in crypto, stealing almost $1 million.