A 20-year-old hacker pleads guilty to a $ 5 million cryptocurrency robbery

After stealing $ 5 million from cryptocurrency to 40 victims during a SIM card exchange, Joel Ortiz, 20, pled guilty to theft and accepted a 10-year prison plea deal, reported by Motherboard, a division of VICE media, on February 1st.

Ortiz accepted the plea agreement last week, according to Erin West, badistant district attorney for Santa Clara County, California. He would be officially sentenced on March 14. Authorities reportedly stated that Ortiz was the first individual convicted of a crime of swapping the SIM card.

"We think justice has been done, and I hope it's a strong message to this community," said Samy Tarazi, one of the officers who investigated Ortiz.

The SIM card exchange is increasingly used by criminals to steal user names and pseudonyms and pseudonyms on social media, which can then be sold on a black market. The Instagram account "@t" would have sold for 40 000 dollars in Bitcoin format (BTC).

When exchanging SIM cards, hackers call a telecommunication company posing as a target and claim that their SIM card has been lost and that they would like their number to be transferred to a new card. Criminals can convince phone companies that they are well what they claim to be by providing social security numbers or addresses.

Once the telecommunication company has transferred the number to a new SIM card, hackers can bypbad the two-step authentication steps of the accounts using the phone as a method of recovery. A hacker told the motherboard: "With someone's phone number, you can access all his accounts in just a few minutes and nobody can do anything about it."

Over the past year, authorities around the world have cracked down on cryptography-related crime. In Russia, a group of nuclear engineers was arrested by security agents after being caught using supercomputers to extract Bitcoin (BTC).

In Thailand, three brothers and sisters – one of whom, Jiratpisit "Boom" Jaravijit, a soap opera actor – were arrested late last year for a $ 24 million cryptocurrency scam aimed at a Finnish investor.