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Following his indictment in November 2021 over a SIM-card-swapping operation that saw him and his co-conspirators steal US$784,000 in cryptocurrency, Joseph James O’Connor has now been sentenced to five years in prison.
O’Connor — who operated under the online handle PlugWalkJoe — was arrested in Spain in 2021 and extradited to the US in April 2023.
O’Connor pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer hacking and a range of other fraud charges related to his SIM-swapping scheme.
The scheme ran between March and May 2019, when O’Connor and his cronies targeted a US cryptocurrency company providing wallets and other crypto industry services. By linking a victim’s mobile phone number to a SIM card controlled by the conspirators, O’Connor was able to access the phones of three executives at the unnamed company.
With that access, the group was able to divert a number of crypto transactions, stealing a range of coins that have a current value of more than US$1.6 million.
“After stealing and fraudulently diverting the stolen cryptocurrency, O’Connor and his co-conspirators laundered it through dozens of transfers and transactions and exchanged some of it for bitcoin using cryptocurrency exchange services,” said the US attorney for the Southern District of New York in an announcement. “Ultimately, a portion of the stolen cryptocurrency was deposited into a cryptocurrency exchange account controlled by O’Connor.”
But while the Southern District of New York was pursuing O’Connor over his SIM-swapping antics, the Northern District of California had laid charges over O’Connor’s July 2020 Twitter hack.
O’Connor and his co-conspirators socially engineered their way to gaining access to Twitter’s admin tools and used the access to take over a number of high-profile — and trusted — accounts, including Apple, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama. They then posted scam messages from those accounts, promising to pay out cryptocurrency equal to double the value of cryptocurrency sent to them.
“We are giving back to our community. We support bitcoin and we believe you should too,” the scam tweets read. “All bitcoin sent to our address below will be sent back to you doubled.”
O’Connor also sold access to some accounts to third parties.
The Southern District of New York was also pursuing O’Connor over two SIM-swapping campaigns against two high-profile public figures.
The Californian case was transferred to New York so one judge could try both cases.
In addition to the five-year sentence, O’Connor will also serve three years of supervised release, and he was ordered to forfeit US$794,012.64.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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