Joseph James O’Connor One day, he decided he could run Twitter from his home in Estepona and still make enough money to retire for a while. Thanks to this criminal initiative, among other things, he achieved a pleasant five-year stay in a United States prison.
It all goes back to July 15, 2020, when O’Connor managed to access at least 130 very relevant Twitter accounts. This list included Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Kanye West or official Apple account.
He could post tweets requesting transfers to a specific bitcoin address, mostly to himself. Received 416 transactions worth $117,000Because if someone like Kanye West asks you for money, you’re more likely to send it than PlugwalkJoe.
cork It was a nickname that O’Connor used online to hide his real identity. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched a fact-finding investigation because the Twitter database is located in this country, and after investigations, his name was obtained through two minors who cooperated with justice.
These guys were Plugwalkjoe’s accomplices, and it was with them that he negotiated for Discord to sell Twitter accounts. These boys confessed that O’Connor had a British accent as he originally from Liverpool, and then with more specific data found out that he had previously contacted a known cybercriminal. This eventually led them to find his IP address located in Spain, also through another series of mistakes made by O’Connor. One of them was the publication of his passport in one of the personal Twitter accounts he used.
O’Connor tweeted that he has access to the social network’s internal tools.
Prior to the events of the Twitter hack, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York followed in his footsteps for other crimes, they investigated him for access to the SIM cards of important cryptocurrency portfolio holders in 2019. O’Connor and other hackers succeeded duplicate the SIM cards of your victims’ mobile phones and with the help of a two-factor authentication system, they managed to steal hundreds of thousands of euros.
By replacing the SIM card, O’Connor gained access to text messages that were intended for their real owners and contained the information needed to reset passwords. Thus, he made transfers in the amount more than 1 million euros.
O’Connor also agreed very famous Snapchat and Tik-Tok accounts, and there is evidence that he extorted money from actress Bella Thorne after discovering nude images of her on her own Snapchat. Bella Thorne, to get ahead of O’Connor, unexpectedly posted photos on her Twitter account claiming she was extorted by a hacker, which happened in 2019.
Another social media account that O’Connor was able to hack using the SIM replacement method belonged to Addison Rayis a celebrity on Tik-Tok with 88.5 million followers today and an additional 38 million accounts on Instagram.
Plugwalkjoe made his mark on this occasion. U.S. Attorney Ismail J. Ramsey made these claims about the protagonist of the article “O’Connor left an impressive trace of destruction from his criminal activitiesand there are more crimes he committed.
He harassed a minor under the age of 16, threatening her with death if she did not send him nude photos. He also made false threats about a US airport bomb and slap. It consists in calling the emergency services with a warning that something very serious is happening in a certain direction, but nothing actually happens. This is done so that the victim, who does not know what will happen to her, visits the special forces at home.
There have been instances in the US where these events have been caught on gamers’ cameras and there have even been deaths after being shot by the police. This crime began among gamers who wanted to take revenge on a strong opponent, and today it is great danger to collective security because it has spread to other countries, even to Spain.
Joseph James O’Connor was extradited last April to the United States and on June 23, he was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to most of the charges against which he was accused. When he was arrested in Estepona, he only kept in contact with his mother, whom he gave clear instructions to visit him at his luxurious hideout in Costa Natura, with plenty of time not to be discovered.
O’Connor bought a house in this urbanization.
NEW CRIMINAL ZONE
Government agencies are gradually adapting to new reality of crime. Denmark was one of the first countries to create a dedicated police force for online patrols, it created it in April 2022. Consisting of 10 police officers, this unit is mainly designed to be present in online video games or high activity networks. . When they play they clearly identify themselves as cops and this is meant to be detected sexual predators or economic cybercriminals.
@onlinepatrulje Se vores betjente turns on the gas in search of the game world. Følg dem på Twitch.tv/politietsonlinepatrulje 💻👾🎮 #politi #politietsonlinepatrulje #police #danskpoliti #gaming #gamingontiktok #gamingpolice #onlinepatrulje #fortnite #codmw #csgo #gamer #videogames #twitch #twitchstreamer ♬ original sound
These agents play Call of Duty or Counter Strike in uniform and have already started 65 criminal cases and over 5,000 requests resolved made by users. Their patrol is online and they say they act like it’s a street routine. We have less to find real agents in GTA VI.
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