Man Who Hijacked SEC's X Account To Pump Bitcoin Faces Up To 5 Years In Prison (gizmodo.com) 33
Eric Council Jr. pleaded guilty to identity theft and access device fraud after hijacking the SEC's X account to falsely announce Bitcoin ETF approval. He was compensated in Bitcoin by co-conspirators, and while the Justice Department continues its investigation, Council faces up to five years in prison. Gizmodo reports: According to the Justice Department, Council accessed the SEC's account using an attack called SIM swapping, in which a perpetrator uses social engineering to trick a phone carrier's customer service representatives into transferring an individual's phone number to a new device. Basically, they call into a support line and use pieces of personal information about a victim they have gathered online to convince the representative they are the person they are targeting. Once perpetrators take the number and can begin receiving text messages, they are able to reset the passwords of accounts on services like X. It is not really a "hack" in the traditional sense that they are not finding flaws in software but rather exploiting human trust.
Unfortunately for individuals like Council, all Bitcoin transactions are logged on a blockchain for anyone to see, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for investigators to find. If he did make out with a lot of crypto, it would be hard to keep it hidden forever. Council allegedly did not post the message himself to the SEC's X account, but conducted the SIM swap and left the rest of the work to his co-conspirators who compensated Council in the form of, of course, Bitcoin. The price of the cryptocurrency rose by $1,000 after the fake announcement, according to the Justice Department, and fell by $2,000 after the SEC issued a correction. That could have led to a big windfall depending on how much Bitcoin the perpetrators held at the time.
Unfortunately for individuals like Council, all Bitcoin transactions are logged on a blockchain for anyone to see, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for investigators to find. If he did make out with a lot of crypto, it would be hard to keep it hidden forever. Council allegedly did not post the message himself to the SEC's X account, but conducted the SIM swap and left the rest of the work to his co-conspirators who compensated Council in the form of, of course, Bitcoin. The price of the cryptocurrency rose by $1,000 after the fake announcement, according to the Justice Department, and fell by $2,000 after the SEC issued a correction. That could have led to a big windfall depending on how much Bitcoin the perpetrators held at the time.
Elona Musk will release him (Score:1)
And get him to work for the DGE.
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Speaking of Musk, when is he going to be prosecuted for all his pump-and-dump scams?
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Elon Musk FAP
When you get done you can explain to us how Elon is god even though he runs Tesla and EVs are woke liberal bullshit
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I dont get the musk hate with slashdot, he is on the same scale as the rest of us.
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As soon as Trump does not like him anymore. Which should happen pretty soon.
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TDS? Why are you bringing the ability to believe el Bunko into this? And the ability to believe Elmo is just as stupid.
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I didn't know it was possible for someone to release themselves from jail.
Oh wait, this wasn't Musk?
Re: Elona Musk will release him (Score:2)
So there's no chance the guy will wind up in federal pound-me-in -the-a$$ prison?
The irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Eric Council Jr. uses government resources to promote his cryptocurrency = five years in jail.
Donald Trump uses government resources to promote his own cryptocurrency = he's hundreds of millions of dollars richer. [reuters.com]
Moral of the story: Our government doesn't like competition.
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More accurately, el Bunko's government does not like competition.
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From your link:
The meme coin, known as $Trump, was launched by the president on Jan. 17 and quickly surged, reaching a peak of over $14.5 billion in overall market value by Jan. 19, the day before his inauguration. It has since slumped by two-thirds.
Which government resources do you claim that Trump used to promote his meme coin before he was inaugurated?
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Having access to transition-oriented resources doesn't mean he used them to promote his meme coin, or even that they could reasonably be used to promote it.
The OP made the positive assertion here. It's their burden [wikipedia.org] to prove it.
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So let's take "government resources" out of the equation and we are still left with the current President of the United States pulling little more than a Nigerian prince scam on his constituents.
You are welcome to glaze over it as NBD but some of us find that behavior from the person we elect to represent us, a literal 1 out of 350 million person choice as maybe a bad thing. Maybe it's bad if the US President is lying to the citizenry for money in his own pocket. Maybe you say that politicians do that all
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Only a month ago, the then-President pardoned his own son for any and all crimes, known and unknown, against the entire federal government for an 11-year period. This was broader than any other pardon that has ever been given by the President, and with the only objective being to protect his criminal son from facing justice for those crimes.
Please show us where you took issue with that abuse of actual presidential power before you ask us to care about the revised goalposts on this topic.
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And Trump Pardoned/commutated Roger Stone for defying a Congressional Subpoena for evidence about his role with the Guccifer leaks which would have forced him to discuss his relations with a foreign state actor who accessed and leaked a US political candidates information. Trump did this in coordination for Stone. So do we really want to go tit-for-tat on pardons? There is decades of bad behaviour from every admin when it comes to that power. Frankly I am in support of stripping the President of pardon po
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If you're going to whatabout, make sure they're comparable. Commuting a sentence is hardly anything like a pardon, much less an 11-year pardon for all crimes known and unknown.
We'll just take it as conceded that you don't care about Biden bailing out his son, using $1B of taxpayer money to further his son's influence sales, lying about having met his son's business partners, accepting the proceeds of both his son's and his brother's influence sales, and so on. You just want to be mad at Trump for doing th
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Context matters, Roger Stone commited a crime on purpose with the understanding that he could defy Congress because the executive would pardon him for commiting said crime to protect said executive. That's bad! That's very bad!
mad at Trump for doing things as a private citizen
His issue with Roger Stone was while he was President (otherwise how could he pardon).
Your presumption is wrong on it's face, nobody especially me really cares if Hunter Biden went to prison becaues we care about Hunter Biden he can rot for all I care but fact is Hunter Biden never wo
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And to second that, Joe Biden upon coming into office did he fire the prosecutor investigating his son? No, he didn't. Did he interfere with the Special Counsel looking into his own document issue? No he did not.
Does that mean Joe Biden didn't anything bad or corrupt or that I don't wish he would have acted differently? Hell no, he fucked up more than a couple things but the Republican playbook is to equivocate everything bad as equal to everything else as bad. It's saying punching a guy is the same as sh
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I'm pretty sure there is a bible verse that talks about a rich man who convinces poor people into giving him their money. Guess a lot of "christians" aren't familiar with the material.
I'm not sure I would call Trump the government (Score:2)
That's a wide enough margin by far to have given Haris the win. If the Democrats had any backbone they'd be doing something about it right now but instead the dumbasses think they can get concessions out of the Republicans during budget negotiations.
As long as they can blame it on the Democrats the government would love to shut down the government. They could buy up all our houses during the res
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I mean as long as the likes of Pelosi keep insider trading, I'm not sure I can be arsed to blame Trump for pulling these stunts.
That whole country is rotten to the core. Trump is merely a visible sore for a much larger auto immune disease.
Give this man a job (Score:2)
How Much Did He Make? (Score:2)
I suspect that something like this would earn him a princely sum in crypto.
What's you're price for 5 years in prison?