High School Teen Sentenced To 3 Years for Hacking Celebrity Twitter Accounts in Bitcoin Scam
A brilliant yet criminally savvy Tampa high-school teenager was convicted of hacking numerous celebrity Twitter accounts in 2020 in an attempt to get over $100,000 in Bitcoin. This high-profile case includes the hacked social media accounts of some of the most well-known celebrities globally, plus numerous U.S. presidents and global businesses including Uber, and more.
Graham Ivan Clark, now eighteen, appeared before Florida's 13th Judicial Circuit Court in Tampa. He pled guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison, minus 229 days as time served. He was charged with thirty felonies.
The teenage cyber hacker agreed to a plea agreement that allowed him to be classified as a “youthful offender.” If Clark had been convicted as an adult, as he was first charged in the crimes, he would have served a minimum sentence of ten years.
At seventeen, Clark created a digital scheme to cyber hack the Twitter accounts of famous people. The ambitious high school student targeted now President Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Apple, Uber, and others.
In July 2020, Clark’s social media cyber breaches were successful and sent out emails from various celebrities, political figures, and major businesses. These phishing emails were sent from hacked celebrities' Twitter accounts to everyday Americans to trick them into sending Bitcoin.
Tweets arriving from Biden’s Twitter account, for example, were sent out asking for Bitcoin. In one tweet, it said, “I am giving back to the community. All Bitcoin sent to the address below will be sent back doubled! If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000. Only doing this for 30 minutes … Enjoy!”
Unsuspecting victims believed the tweets, and Clark received about $121,000 in Bitcoin before he was arrested. The payments came in after about one hundred thirty high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked and used in the scheme. Clark was the mastermind in about three hundred successful transactions from this data breach and phishing scam.
The most significant Bitcoin payment that the scammer received was about $42,000 traced to a Japanese cryptocurrency exchange.
Cybercrimes are growing at a tremendous rate and have created a new niche for attorneys. As of late 2020, Risk Based Security reported 36 billion data breaches have occurred. These shocking high numbers of cyber breaches are growing still, resulting in increasing ransomware costs, phishing attacks, malware attacks, data breach costs, social engineering cybercrime, and more.
Clark had somehow gained access to Twitter’s information technology department's internal systems via an unwittingly helpful Twitter employee. Once the victims received the fake tweets from high-profile accounts, Clark sent the Bitcoin to his personal account.
After Clark is released, he will still need to serve three more years on probation.
