The Tampa Bay teenage hacker who took control of several well-known Twitter accounts — Apple, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Kim Kardashian, Uber, and others — in summer 2020 and used them to solicit more than $100,000 in Bitcoin pleaded guilty to Florida state charges Tuesday in exchange for a three-year prison sentence. In a deal with prosecutors, Graham Ivan Clark agreed to serve three years in prison, followed by three years probation.
Clark was 17 when he was accused of masterminding a brazen social media hack that targeted some of the world’s most famous names.
The agreement allowed Clark, now 18, to be sentenced as a “youthful offender,” avoiding a minimum 10-year sentence that would have followed if he’d been convicted as an adult. The mandatory minimum will only apply if Clark violates his probation. He will serve time in a state prison designated for young adults. He may be eligible to serve some of his time in a military-style boot camp…
Provisions of the plea agreement require that Clark will be barred from using computers without permission and supervision from law enforcement. He will have to submit to searches of his property and give up the passwords to any accounts he controls. His defense attorney, David Weisbrod, confirmed that Clark had turned over all the cryptocurrency he had acquired…
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement found that he accessed Twitter’s systems by convincing an employee he worked in the company’s information technology department. He then managed to access the company’s customer service portal.
MacDailyNews Note: After gaining access to the Twitter accounts, hacker Clark posted similar messages, such as: “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!”
We heard he got some time knocked off his sentence for “good behavior” by briefly making tweets from Bill Gates and Kim Kardashian seem even remotely interesting.