An 18-year-old Florida teenager who ran a scam that used hacked celebrity Twitter accounts to dupe ordinary people out of their money has been sentenced to three years behind bars, the Office of the State Attorney 13th Judicial Circuit in Tampa announced.
“He took over the accounts of famous people, but the money he stole came from regular, hard-working people,“ State Attorney Andrew Warren said in a statement. ”Graham Clark needs to be held accountable for that crime, and other potential scammers out there need to see the consequences.”
Once Clark accessed the accounts, he tweeted a link to a bitcoin address and wrote, “all bitcoin sent to our address below will be sent back to you doubled!” prompting a number of people to send in cryptocurrency in hopes of a quick profit.
“Instead Clark kept the money,” the state attorney’s office wrote, adding that the so-called Bit-Con grift netted him more than $117,440. The money was seized by law enforcement and is expected to be returned to the rightful owners.
The incident represented an embarrassing security breach for Twitter, which was forced to suspend all verified accounts from sending tweets for several hours while it scrambled to secure the platform.
Following an investigation, Clark was arrested several days after running the scam.
“A great deal of impressive work has gone into stopping these fraud schemes and holding the people behind them accountable,” Warren said.
“This is one part of a nationwide effort, and we want to recognize all the federal partners involved—the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, other elements of the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, the IRS, and the Secret Service,” he added.
“They quickly unraveled this mystery that stretched around the world, and then worked nonstop to catch the fraudsters who tried to take advantage of millions of unsuspecting people,” he said.
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