17-year-old American boy refuses to plead guilty to Bitcoin scam

Beijing, August 5 (Xinhua) -- The Twitter accounts of dozens of political and business celebrities, including former US President Barack Obama and the world's richest man Jeff Bezos, were hacked last month. Hackers manipulated these celebrity accounts to post fraudulent information and quickly defrauded hundreds of netizens of more than $100,000 in Bitcoin. The investigation pointed to a 17-year-old boy in Florida, but he refused to plead guilty on the 4th and denied that he was the "mastermind".

The teenager is Graham Clark, who was arrested in Tampa, Florida on July 31 on suspicion of planning and launching the hacker attack and Bitcoin fraud. He faces 30 felony charges and is being held in a local detention center. The judge set a high bail of $725,000 for him.

Clark attended a court hearing on the 4th and refused to plead guilty. The Associated Press reported that the hearing was held online and Clark denied all charges via the video conferencing software "Zoom".

Clark is scheduled to attend another hearing on the 5th to ask the judge to reduce his bail. His lawyer David Weisbrod has not yet responded to media inquiries.

On July 15, hackers manipulated the Twitter accounts of dozens of political and business celebrities to post messages, pretending to be celebrities and pretending to give "red envelopes" to the public, promising that people would get double the return as long as they transferred the equivalent of $1,000 in Bitcoin to a specific account. In just a few hours, hackers defrauded at least $116,000 in Bitcoin from about 300 people.

The number of hacked Twitter accounts and the magnitude of their impact are shocking. In addition to Obama and Bezos, accounts of former US Vice President Joe Biden, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, well-known investor Warren Buffett, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, rapper Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian, as well as Apple, Uber and other companies were hacked.

According to Dmitry Alperovich, co-founder of the US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, this was "the most serious hacker attack on a major social media platform to date."

When describing Clark's methods of committing crimes, US investigators frequently mentioned the term "social engineering". Experts say that social engineering is a method of defrauding and harming victims by exploiting their psychological weaknesses, curiosity, greed, trust and other psychological traps, usually by talking or impersonating to obtain information or access rights from legitimate users.

Some people give the example that cryptographers sometimes find loopholes to bypass encryption technology and decipher ciphertext, while "social engineers" bypass security technology by deceiving someone.

U.S. investigators said Clark allegedly "used social engineering to trick a Twitter employee into believing he was a colleague in the company's IT department, who then provided Clark with the data needed to access the customer service portal."

The U.S. Department of Justice said that in addition to Clark, two other men were charged for allegedly assisting in the hacking attack. They are 19-year-old British man Mason Shepherd and 22-year-old Nima Fazeli from Orlando, Florida.

In an interview with the media, Fazeli's father said that he could not believe that his son was involved in a Bitcoin scam. "My son is honest, smart and loyal... We are shocked. This must be a mistake."