Hacker Jailed for Stealing Millions of Dollars in Cryptocurrencies by SIM Hijacking

A sixth member affiliated with an global hacking group known as The Group has been sentenced in link with a multimillion-greenback SIM swapping conspiracy, the U.S. Office of Justice (DoJ) explained.

Garrett Endicott, 22, from the U.S. state of Missouri, who pleaded responsible to charges of wire fraud and aggravated identification theft adhering to an indictment in 2019, was sentenced to 10 months in prison and requested to pay an amount of money totaling $121,549.37 in restitution.

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SIM swapping, also termed SIM hijacking, refers to an identity theft scheme whereby malicious get-togethers persuade phone carriers into porting their victims’ cell services to SIM cards less than their regulate, normally facilitated by bribing an worker of a cell phone company or by making contact with the provider provider’s shopper guidance by posing as the target and requesting that the phone amount be swapped to a SIM card operated by the team.

The objective is to leverage the phone figures as a gateway to hijack distinct on-line services used by the targets these kinds of as email, cloud storage, and cryptocurrency exchange accounts by resetting their passwords and one-time verification codes that are sent by way of SMS messages as part of the two-factor authentication (2FA) method, enabling the cybercrime crew to circumvent security measures.

“Users of The Local community engaged in Sim Hijacking to steal cryptocurrency from victims across the place, including California, Missouri, Michigan, Utah, Texas, New York, and Illinois,” the DoJ mentioned, resulting in the theft of cryptocurrency valued, at the time of the theft, ranging anywhere concerning $2,000 to a lot more than $5 million, from various influenced parties.

Endicott is also the sixth and the final of the team users from the case to be sentenced among two to four many years in jail, which include 4 other individuals in the U.S. and just one in Eire — Ricky Handschumacher (28), Colton Jurisic (22), Reyad Gafar Abbas (22), Conor Freeman (22), and Ryan Stevenson (29).

“The actions of these defendants resulted in the decline of thousands and thousands of bucks to the victims, some of whom lost their overall retirement cost savings,” said Performing U.S. Legal professional Saima Mohsin for the Eastern District of Michigan. “This scenario need to serve as a reminder to all of us to defend our individual and fiscal information from those people who find to steal it.”

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