Federal Judge Jed Rakoff has sentenced a British citizen on trial for Twitter hacking and SIM-swapping scams. The criminal under question now convicted for a five-year sentence by the Southern District of New York is known by the alias of “Twitter hacker” but his real name is Joseph O’Conner. The hacker is said to target key figures in the sector and has reportedly amassed $103,960 from illegal activities. This incident has also prompted authorities at Twitter to upgrade security measures on the platform.
Connor is found to be guilty of running a giveaway that trapped many users on the social media platform. Meanwhile, Judge Rakoff has called for accountability concerning the crimes committed by Connor that have caused considerable financial damages for his victims. Judge has opted for a long sentence aiming it to serve as a precedent for threat actors in general.
The Commodity and Futures Commission of USA has resorted to legal action against William Koo Ichioka. The convicted is facing charges for running a crypto Ponzi scheme and siphoning billions of dollars from his victims while posing as digital assets and forex broker. The case is now under processing at the District Northern Court of California. As per the court filings, Ichioka is charged with stealing $21 million from investors under the alleged fraud. The accused in the case was running a scam trading company named Ichioka Ventures. He offered as high as 10% return for his investors per day. At the same time, he also allegedly forged documents to present to his victims as false statements to entrap new victims. At one end, the CFTC is trying to ignore his settlement offer and bring a permanent trading ban on the accused. On the other hand, DOJ and SEC are also conducting investigation into Ichioka and his fraudulent company to take prosecutory actions against him.
The world of DeFi and cryptocurrency has its run-ins with hackers and exploiters. Last Month, a hacker managed to get away with 4,000 tokens out of a protocol using an exploit. At the time of the theft, the total amount of the stolen tokens were valued at $7.5 million. Cyber security firm PeckerShield published a report explaining that hackers took advantage of the slippage control mechanism on the liquidity pool of the affected DeFi protocol. It is important to note that exploits happen when hackers try to find a technical blind spot in a given DeFi protocol. By finding this loophole, the hackers are able to take out token reserves or steal from the user wallets that are using that DeFi protocol. In this incident, the hacker managed to siphon off a major amount of token that was serving as liquidity in the LP of the given DeFi protocol in question.
