A resident of the UK, Joseph James O’Connor, also known under the pseudonym PlugwalkJoe, is accused of participating in a fraudulent scheme, as a result of which assets worth about $784,000 were stolen from the cryptocurrency company at the time of the theft. This is reported by the US Department of Justice.
According to the investigation, from March to May 2019, O’Connor and his accomplices organized a scheme to replace SIM cards and stole crypto assets from an American company providing infrastructure for a cryptocurrency wallet and bitcoin exchanges. Its name is not disclosed.
With such an attack, attackers gain control over the victims’ phone numbers and access to their messages and calls, which allows them to bypass multi-factor authentication.
O’Connor and his accomplices thus compromised the device of one of the company’s executives and withdrew about 770 BCH, 6,363 LTC, 407 ETH and more than 7 BTC from customers’ wallets.
The attackers laundered the stolen assets and exchanged some of them for bitcoins through cryptocurrency exchange services.
Part of the funds ended up in O’Connor’s account on the crypto exchange.
In July, he was arrested in Spain on suspicion of participating in the hacking of many celebrity Twitter accounts.
Earlier, ForkLog reported that a California resident lost $27,000 in bitcoin due to the substitution of a SIM card.