Jailed British hacker who hijacked X accounts including Apple, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama—then used them for a ‘double your money’ Bitcoin scam—has to hand back $5.4 million in ill-gotten crypto gains

A Brit who hacked multiple high-profile Twitter / X accounts in 2020, and who was extradited to the US and jailed in 2023, has now been ordered to hand over £4.1 million ($5.4 million) in ill-gotten crypto gains (thanks, BBC).

Joseph O’Connor, now 26 years old, hijacked over 130 accounts, including those of Apple, Uber, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and Kanye West. Alongside other hackers, three of whom have been charged, they then impersonated the companies / individuals in question and used the accounts to promote a classic “double your money” scam.

The hijacked accounts would send tweets asking followers to send Bitcoin to digital wallets, promising that the money would be doubled and returned. An estimated 350 million Twitter users viewed these dodgy tweets and, over 15-16 July 2020, a total of 426 transfers totalling 12.86 Bitcoin was made to the wallets. This would have been worth around $110,000 in 2020: now the value would be more like $1.2 million.

The hack itself, as they often are, was more down to social engineering than cyber genius. The group persuaded a handful of Twitter employees to hand over their internal login details, through which they gained access to the site’s admin tools. From here they were able to access internal controls and gain fraudulent access to the accounts in question.

O’Connor is currently serving a five year sentence in the US, but this new asset seizure was led by the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which has managed to recover 42 Bitcoin and other assets from the fraudster. Obviously this is a higher value than the Twitter hack alone: the CPS says its investigators believe that the additional Bitcoin was also obtained through hacks, adding the detail that O’Connor carried these out with other young men he’d met through Call of Duty.

“Even when someone is not convicted in the UK, we are still able to ensure they do not benefit from their criminality,” said Adrian Foster of the CPS Proceeds of Crime Division.