Taking over someone else's identity is as easy as calling those with administrative rights, open a computer, connect it to the internet to access Twitter.
That is what a British man did, when he hacked high profile Twitter accounts as part of a Bitcoin scam.
Joseph O'Connor, from Liverpool, hijacked more than 130 accounts in July 2020, including those of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, and Warren Buffett.
In his hacking spree, he also targeted leading brands such as Apple and Uber.
This time, the 24-year-old pleaded guilty to hacking charges, and has been jail in the U.S.
According to the United States Attorney's Office in the southern district of New York, the man is sentenced to five years for his cyber crimes.
The hacking was part of a major Bitcoin scam that generated tweets asking followers to send Bitcoin to an account, promising to double their money.
Because O'Connor was tweeting using famous people's and brands' Twitter accounts, many Twitter users fell for the scam.
As a result of the fraud, thousands of people from the estimated 350 million Twitter users who viewed the suspicious tweets from the official accounts were scammed.
Those people were duped into believing that a cryptocurrency giveaway was real.
The 2020 hacking allegedly netted O'Connor more than $118,000 in Bitcoin.
To do that he did, O'Connor telephoned a small number of Twitter employees, and using sophisticated social engineering tricks, they created a believable tale to convince them to hand over their internal login details.
After successfully tricking them, the hackers managed to enter Twitter's administrative tool, and grant themselves increased privilege.
This allows them to access Twitter's powerful control panel.
It's worth noting that O'Connor was not alone.
O'Connor, who pleaded guilty, was charged alongside three men: fellow Briton Mason Sheppard, from Bognor Regis, West Sussex, and two Americans, Graham Ivan Clark and Nima Fazeli.
He also pleaded guilty to stealing $794,000 in virtual currency from a New York cryptocurrency company, by targeting three of its executives. O'Connor stole cryptocurrency from two of the company's clients, and laundered it, prosecutors said.
O'Connor, who went by the alias PlugwalkJoe, the mastermind the massive, global scam, was caught in Estepona, Spain, July 22, 2021.
He was caught at his apartment in the Costa Natura area, which offers an indoor swimming pool.
While the apartment he was living in was a luxurious one, O'Connor was living modestly, and only had few belongings, and not a trace of luxury was found.
The police found three half-unpacked Mr. Monopoly boxes he purchased to celebrate some of his cryptocurrency exploits. The apartment he was in, has two rooms: his bedroom, and his 'office.'
The only expensive item in the office is his computer, which O'Connor allegedly replaced once every three weeks. The PC is worth around €6,000.
A Persian rug can be seen under his PC table.
According to the police, O'Connor was not resisting arrest. His movement is slow, and is said to be between lazy and breaded, with a disheveled appearance. O'Connor with long unkempt hair, was wearing T-shirt, sports shorts and flip flops with socks.
In fact, O'Connor was calm the entire time, that he acted as a host and had a sense of humor, and even cracked a few jokes, to which the police officers quickly detected a glimpse of his emotional intelligence skills.
Despite living in a hermit life, O'Connor understands Spanish perfectly and speaks it quite well, although he does not always conjugate verbs very well.
O'Connor was only shocked and showed disbelief when the police explained to him that the U.S. has requested his extradition.
The police concluded at the time, that O'Connor's total disinterest in having a social life explained how difficult it was to find him.
They asked him if he liked cars and he replied without much interest that he didn't have a license, that he was incredibly lazy to get one in Spain. He has no friends, and no girlfriends, meaning that nobody really visited him.
He never really left the house, said one of the inspectors, who thought that the young man might have some kind of disorder that prevented him from relating.
O'Connor was extradited to the U.S. in April in 2023.
Besides that, the U.S. Justice Department added that O'Connor admitted other hacking crimes including gaining access to a high-profile TikTok account belonging to Addison Rae.
O'Connor allegedly used Rae's TikTok account to post self-promotional messages, and threatened to release sensitive personal information related to Rae to individuals who joined a specified Discord server.
O'Connor is also believed to be behind an attack on actress Bella Thorne, where he allegedly threatened to leak nude photographs he had obtained by hacking her Snapchat account unless she agreed to various demands.
Thorne preemptively posted on Twitter that she had been "threatened with my own nudes," and posted screenshots of the text messages. Thorne then said that she was releasing the photographs so that the hacker would not be able to "take yet another thing from me.'"
O'Connor is also said to have cyberstalked a 16-year-old girl
In all, charges O'Connor pleaded guilty to were conspiracy to commit computer intrusions, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering and stalking two victims.
O'Connor is also accused of stalking a minor, a 16-year-old girl, and have sent her nude pictures.
According to Kenneth A Polite Jr, an assistant attorney general in the U.S. justice department's criminal division:
"Like many criminal actors, O'Connor tried to stay anonymous by using a computer to hide behind stealth accounts and aliases from outside the United States."
In total, his charges carried a total maximum sentence of more than 70 years, and up to 20 years additional years for the most serious of the charges.
In the end, he received five-year term, but also has been handed three years of supervised release.
Besides receiving jail time, O'Connor was also ordered to pay almost $800,000 in forfeiture, the U.S. Justice Department said.