20 Year Old H A C K E R Pleads Guilty to $5 Million Cryptocurrency Theft

After stealing $ 5 million in cryptocurrency from 40 victims through the SIM exchange, Joel Ortiz, 20, pleaded guilty to theft and accepted a 10-year prison sentence as reported by Motherboard, a division of the media. VICE news, on February 1. Ortiz accepted the agreement with the prosecution last week, according to Erin West, the District Deputy Attorney for Santa Clara County, California. It will be officially sentenced on March 14. The authorities claim that Ortiz is the first individual convicted of a crime by exchange of SIM. "We believe that justice has been done, and hopefully, this is a strong message for that community," said Samy Tarazi, one of the agents who investigated Ortiz for the motherboard. The SIM exchange is increasingly popular among criminals as a means to steal user names and fiat handles, cryptography and even social networks, which can then be sold on the black market. The Instagram account "@t" was sold for $ 40,000 in Bitcoin (BTC). In the SIM exchange, hackers call a telecommunications company that pretends to be their target and claim that their SIM card has been lost and they would like their number to be transferred to a new card. Criminals can convince telephone companies that they are who they say they are by providing social security numbers or addresses. Once the telecommunications company transfers the number to a new SIM card, hackers can bypass two-step authentication measures for the accounts using the phone as a recovery method. A hacker told the motherboard: "With someone's phone number, he can access every account he has in a matter of minutes and they can not do anything about it." Over the past year, authorities around the world have cracked down on crimes related to cryptography. In Russia, a group of nuclear engineers were arrested by security agents when they were caught using supercomputers to exploit Bitcoin (B T C). In Thailand, three brothers, one of whom is the soap opera actor Jiratpisit "B O O M" Jaravijit, were arrested late last year in connection with a $ 24 million cryptocurrency scam aimed at a Finnish investor.