Virtual bail hearing for teen Twitter hacker is HACKED with porn videos and rap music
THE virtual bail hearing for the teen cops say was behind the massive Twitter attack was hacked itself — with rap music and raunchy porn videos broadcast into the stream.
Graham Ivan Clark, 17, was hit with a slew of charges after he allegedly hijacked the Twitter accounts of famous and prominent people to scam people for Bitcoin money.
On Wednesday, Clark appeared in a Florida court via Zoom for a bail hearing, as his lawyers were asking for his bail to be lowered.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, his attorneys argued the $725,000 he has to post in order to get out of jail isn’t equivalent to the $117,000 he is said to have made off the scam.
But during the hearing, porn videos, rap music, and shrieking came through on screen — prompting the judge to cancel the hearing.
Clark was arrested on Friday in Tampa and is being charged as an adult by the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office.
Mason Sheppard, 19, of Bognor Regis, United Kingdom, and Nima Fazeli, 22, of Orlando, were charged separately in California federal court.
The high-profile security breach on Twitter on July 15 included fake tweets being sent from accounts like former President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Mike Bloomberg.
The accounts of tech billionaires including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, in addition to Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West, were also hacked.
The accounts sent out fake tweets that read: “I am giving back to my community due to Covid-19! All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled.
“If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000! “Only doing this for the next 30 minutes! Enjoy.”
Shortly after the hack, the FBI said they were investigating, as Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said they “detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack.”
Investigators were able to link Sheppard and Fazeli to the various Discord accounts involved using their driver’s license numbers, which the pair used to verify their cryptocurrency wallets.
Clark knowingly “accessed a computer, computer system, computer network and electronic devices used by Twitter” months before the attack on May 3, a May 30 court filing alleges.
The court records don’t specify what happened on May 3, nor what the teen allegedly did between that date and the July 15 attack.
But on the day of the hack, a person with the handle Kirk#5270 allegedly posted on a Discord online chat forum that “that he/she could reset, swap and control any Twitter account at will, and would do so in exchange for bitcoin transfers,” according to court docs.
A search warrant obtained by FBI investigators helped them access the Discord conversations between Kirk#5270 and an unidentified user named Rolex#0373, a handle later discovered to be associated with Fazeli.
Kirk#5270 (Clark) allegedly provided Rolex#0373 (Fazeli) with a Bitcoin address detectives interpreted as Kirk#5270 asking for payment for access to the Twitter accounts, the filing states.
“For example, ‘Kirk#5270’ provided images of administrator-level access to Twitter accounts ‘@bumblebee,’ ‘@sc,’ ‘@vague,’ and ‘@R9,’ among many others,” the documents say.
“Based on the chat as a whole, it appears that ‘ever so anxious#0001’ began to find buyers for Twitter usernames.”
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Federal agents later determined that by the time the hack concluded, the Bitcoin address associated with the attack processed roughly 415 transactions worth 12.86 Bitcoin, or about $117,457 — the amount that was scammed from the victims.
During Clark’s bail hearing on Wednesday, prosecutors said the 17-year-old’s premises were raided last summer in a separate cryptocurrency investigation, per the Tampa Bay Times.
He’s been charged with 17 counts of communications fraud, 11 counts of fraudulent use of personal information, and one count each of organized fraud of more than $5,000 and accessing computers or electronic devices without authority.