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In today’s capitalist world, we easily turn our heads away from the ugly parts of anything that promises us monetary gain, this time it’s about Twitter.
This innate greed blended with the impatience of this technological generation is the perfect recipe to gravitate us toward a tweet like the one below.
or this…
When innocent civilians thought that the President of the United States and one of the richest men in the world were feeling a little extra philanthropic on what they considered their luckiest day alive…reality was far from their expectations.
Behind the screens was actually a British man they had never even heard of, holding the power of 130 people’s accounts and information in his hands-
Joseph James O’ Connor Scams on Twitter
Famously known as ‘plugwalk Joe’ he has been accused of a list of crimes longer than his name. He is a 23-year-old man of British origin, but the servers he used to carry out his crimes are located in Spain.
He has 14 alleged charges on his name, including money laundering, membership of a criminal gang, internet fraud, and extortion.
He is also a suspect for hacking a prominent Snapchat figure’s account and blackmailing them with the threat of propagating their nudes. (There is speculation that this figure is Bella Thorne but this remains unconfirmed).
Along with this huge pile of allegations, Connor must also find a way of justifying Swatting if he plans on remaining a free citizen. (Swatting is the crime of calling emergency services to dispatch fake arms or forces) One of his calls is said to have included a pretense of a man ready to kill his children and wife.
The young hacker is also a suspect for having conducted a bitcoin scam. In multiple tweets like the ones above, he promised to double the money from accounts of prominent people who had credibility to their name, linking to a bitcoin account that was actually Connor’s.
Spanish court has finally gave approval for Joe’s extradition to the US.
Connor had been arrested in Costa del Soul(located in southern Spain) in July 2021, however, he remained in custody there.
Certain conditions were required to be met for him to be eligible for extradition which was recently satisfied.
Before the decision was finalized, he placed forward two primary arguments in front of the Spanish judges against his extradition which were both negated:
- That he should be tried in Spain because the alleged crime was conducted using their servers
- U.S court punishments are disproportionate
The Spanish court countered both these arguments stating that the place where most harms was caused due to his suspected crimes, was the United States, hence it is only fair to let them handle the case, moreover they do not hold the right to make a statement on the mannerism of some other nation’s judicial body.
With a list of allegations this serious and long, we are forced to question…
Did he really do it?
Connor has consistently denied the allegations saying they’re laughable. However, he has admitted to buying a stolen account with Bitcoin.
His side of the story is a bit different from what the police believe and hints at a widespread network of young unethical hackers.
James played the victim card deflecting the blame onto a ringleader going by the name ‘Kirk’ who remains unidentified.
Kirk apparently took down the 2-factor authentication security barrier by hacking Twitter’s Internal Slack channel.
2 gamers going by the codenames ‘lol’ and ‘ever so anxious’ stepped forward as witnesses confessing to their involvement in this scheme, but saying that their intentions were not that malicious.
They had just been roped in by Kirk to take control of ‘OG’ accounts and trade them off to gamers. They weren’t aware that the scam would escalate to celebrities and such a large scale.
OG accounts are single-character or single-word usernames (created around the time of the finding of Twitter) that are in high demand among the discord and gaming community.
‘@Ever so anxious’ took the tag ‘@anxious’ for themselves.
Kirk had confessed to the two witnesses that he was a twitter employee, and this fact is highly probable to be true because Twitter themselves stated that the tools used in the hack are only available to the people working within the company.
An incident like this could’ve had bigger impacts, such large-scale hacking easily holds the power to overturn markets, manipulate elections, blacklist big names, and wreck careers not… Twitter in this case got lucky that the harms caused were big but not drastic enough to end the Social Media Platform completely.
Its security has been questioned a lot since this incident, especially owing to the political significance the app holds, and its wide reach.
The racket is still being investigated and now Connor’s fate lies in the hands of the United States of America.
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