A teenager from Florida, who managed and violated the Twitter accounts of high-ranking officials, was sentenced and will serve a three-year prison sentence, followed by three more years of surveillance.
According to PC Gamer, this sentence is actually the maximum allowed under the Florida Juvenile Delinquency Act, as Clark was still 17 years old when the accounts were hacked. In addition, he will serve his sentence in a juvenile delinquent facility and will be given training and “transition services” to prepare him for adult life once he has served his sentence. If he violates his surveillance after his release, however, he will face at least ten years in adult prison.
Clark’s fraud paid him 12.86 Bitcoin, worth more than $117.000 the day the hack was made. Law enforcement officers seized all the Bitcoin he stole, and “they are expected to be returned to their rightful owners.”
A few weeks after the scam, Twitter revealed how the young man managed to do this, using a “phone spear phishing attack” addressed to Twitter employees. In effect, Clark was able to convince employees that he was a member of Twitter’s IT department, which eventually allowed him access to the company’s internal account tools. Twitter described the attack as “a significant and coordinated attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities.”
“He took over the accounts of famous people, but the money he stole came from regular, hard-working people. Graham Clark needs to be held accountable for that crime, and other potential scammers out there need to see the consequences,” Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren said in a statement.
