Pornographic images interrupted this Wednesday a court hearing by videoconference of the case of the 17-year-old Floridian accused of having hacked the Twitter accounts of personalities such as Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Elon Musk to defraud other people.
According to local media that covered the hearing chaired by the Judge Christopher Nash of Tampa, Florida West Coast, There was also rap music interference, racial slurs, and shrill sounds.
The judge temporarily interrupted the hearing and when it resumed it denied a request by Graham Clark’s defense to reduce the defendant’s bail of $ 725,000 in order to be released before trial, according to the Tampa television.
The next hearing has been set for October 7.
Clark had pleaded not guilty Tuesday to the thirty charges against the nation of the Hillsborough County (Florida West Coast) prosecutor as the alleged perpetrator of a scam “against people across the country.” Andrew Warren last Friday when the young man was arrested.
Warren alleges that Clark was the mastermind of the July 15 “hack” of some 130 Twitter accounts seeking to “steal money” from ordinary citizens using the names of known persons who had been hacked into accounts, according to Warren. .
In just a few hours, the “hackers” raised more than $ 100,000 in bitcoins, according to the investigation.
“This massive fraud was orchestrated here in our backyard and we are not going to tolerate it,” the prosecutor said when Clark was arrested.
That same day, the arrest of two other suspects in the hacking was announced: the British Mason Sheppard, alias “Chaewon”, 19, and Nima Fazeli, alias “Rolex”, 22, residing in Orlando (Florida) , and that they were accused of several crimes each.
Hackers seized the identity of famous people to write messages on Twitter in which they asked their followers to send bitcoins, more difficult to trace, to accounts associated with Clark, and they would double the amount sent.
In addition to the accounts of former President Barack Obama and businessmen Elon Musk and Bill Gates, the accounts of the virtual Democratic candidate for the White House, Joe Biden, were hacked; from Amazon owner Jeff Bezos; from the artist Kanye West and the companies Uber and Apple.
“This guy’s (Clark) crimes were perpetrated using the names of famous people and celebrities, but they are not the primary victims. This fraud was designed to steal money from thousands of Americans across the country,” said the Prosecutor Warren.
The “hackers” published similar messages on July 15 that offered to double the money that users entered in Bitcoin to a virtual cryptocurrency wallet.
“I am giving back to the community! All the Bitcoin entered at the following address will be returned in duplicate! If you send $ 1,000, I will return you $ 2,000. I will only do it for 30 minutes,” said a message in Biden’s account.
A similar message in Bezos’ account promised to deliver $ 50 million, while Uber promised $ 10 million.
“Due to the COVID-19 we are giving back 10 million dollars in Bitcoin. All payments sent to our address will be returned doubled, “noted the message in the account of the shared transport company.
Twitter recognized the breach in its security system and maintains an internal investigation into it. Last week it revealed in a statement that the incident occurred when attacking company employees through “phishing”.
This technique captures private data by falsifying pages that users know, which are duplicated and request that the confidential data that they want to obtain be entered into it.
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