British hacker must repay £4m after hijacking celebrity Twitter accounts
Joseph O'Connor was arrested in Spain in 2021 and extradited to the US in April
He was sentenced to five years for cyber crimes and was released in 2025, but now must hand over a haul of crypto he gathered through various hacks and scams.
The 26-year-old fled to Spain where his mother lives before being arrested and extradited to the US for trial.
Joseph O'Connor, from Liverpool, hijacked more than 130 accounts in July 2020, including those of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Elon Musk.
A British man who hacked high profile Twitter - now known as X - accounts as part of a Bitcoin scam has been ordered to hand over £4.1m in stolen cryptocurrency.
O'Connor, who went by the alias PlugwalkJoe, carried out the so-called "giveaway scam" with other young men and teenagers - breaking into Twitter's internal systems and taking over high profile accounts.
Three other hackers have been charged over the scam, with US teenager Graham Clark pleading guilty to his part in the deception in 2021.
The hackers gained access to the accounts by first convincing a small number of Twitter employees to hand over their internal login details - which eventually granted them access to the social media site's administrative tools.
They used social engineering tricks to get access to the powerful internal control panel at the site.
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