Last Friday a 17-year-old Florida hacker was arrested and charged as the mastermind behind the bitcoin scam that ensnared the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Apple, and more.
He posed as a member of Twitter’s IT department, in the ultimate phishing scheme, and used Twitter’s own admin tools to break into the popular “verified” accounts and using them in part of his bitcoin scam where he was able to con people into sending him 100 bitcoins during the whole ordeal, which lasted all of just a few hours.
Today was the kid’s bail hearing and because of Covid-19 they did the bail hearing over Zoom, this is despite the fact that Zoom has well-known vulnerabilities. I mean why courts haven’t moved to more stable, secure video conferencing services, I have no idea. But that’s just me.
As you might have guessed, the hacker’s bail hearing got hacked by multiple sources. One hacker spent his time cursing out the court. Another broadcast an anal video from PornHub.
We tried to find out which specific clip it was from PornHub but all I could find was that it was an “ass video”. Perhaps it was one like this Victoria June Big Tits Round Ass video. Who knows.
The judge was rumored to have spent more time “rapidly force-ejecting trolls” than he did on making his actual verdict.
The hearing today was an attempt to get the hacker’s bail hearing lowered from $725,000. The defendant’s lawyer claimed the bail amount was six times more than the $117,000 in bitcoin he’s said to have gotten from the Twitter scam.
That didn’t sway the judge as apparently it wasn’t the suspect’s first rodeo.
Earlier last year California and Florida teamed up to seize his property, including $15,000 in cash, over $4 million in bitcoin, and his personal computers after a previous bitcoin scam got him busted.
At that time he had scammed more than 400 bitcoins, worth over $4 million, but that as part of the previous deal he had to give up 100 of them, which means he still has $3 million in assets, which made him a flight risk.
If that wasn’t enough in January he was linked to a home invasion where two weeks broke into an apartment and the resident shot them intruders, one of which was killed. It is unclear what the hacker’s actual involvement in the home invasion was, but his mother told a deputy that, “ever since her son was involved in a homicide at the beginning of the year, he has been harassed by several individuals.”
Apparently that was his mother’s justification for his recent crimes. The teen is charged with 30 felony counts for scamming people.
The best tweet about the whole thing comes from Ryan Gorman ….
Still trying to process this jaw-dropping development. It wasn’t the Russians, or the Chinese, or the North Koreans, or the Iranians, or some super-sophisticated hacker group who took over Twitter and some of its most prominent accounts…it was a 17-year-old kid here in Tampa.
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Cryptocurrency is a crap shoot at best and not very stable. Too many possibilities for exploits.