US prosecutors said 19-year-old Mason Sheppard was one of three people involved in a plot that experts feared could have sparked war.
Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirms 17-year-old Graham Ivan Clark was arrested in Tampa Friday for the high-profile hack.
According to the FDLE Facebook post, Clark is the “mastermind” behind the hack and is accused of taking control of several accounts belonging to notable people, including former President Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Bill Gates. Investigators says he and two other suspects and used the accounts to spread a Bitcoin scam.
“He gained access to Twitter accounts and to the internal controls of Twitter through compromising a Twitter employee,” said Andrew Warren, the state attorney in Hillsborough County.
None of Clark’s charges are from the federal level but at the state level because the state attorney said there is more flexibility in Florida law to charge minors as adults in financial fraud cases.
Twitter says the hackers used the phone to fool employees at the social media company through a spear phishing attack.
The scammers then hacked the accounts of high-profile individuals that also included presidential candidate Joe Biden and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — the list goes on.
The hackers are accuse of posting tweets telling people if they donated $1,000 in in Bitcoin, they would be given $2,000 in return.
“They’re going to make their play to get you to give up your money, in this case to buy Bitcoin,” Kolko explained. “They’re going to say things like, ‘You’ve only got a few minutes to decide’. It’s going to be a high-pressure sales tactic.”
Complaint claims show the scam Bitcoin account received more than 400 transfers that, in less than a day, accrued about $100,000.
