Overview
- Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service secured a civil recovery order last week to take 42.378 BTC and other crypto holdings tied to the 2020 Twitter/X breach, valued at about £4.1 million as of November 10.
- The assets, which include Ethereum and dollar‑pegged stablecoins, will be sold by a court‑appointed trustee under the proceeds‑of‑crime framework.
- Prosecutors said they worked with authorities in the United States and Spain to serve the order, using UK powers that apply even without a domestic conviction.
- O’Connor pleaded guilty in the U.S. in 2023 and received a five‑year sentence; a U.S. court also ordered $794,012 in forfeiture and $2.19 million in restitution, which the UK court was told had not been enforced.
- The 2020 scheme used SIM‑swapping and social engineering to access Twitter admin tools, hijacking 130+ high‑profile accounts—including those of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk and others—to push a Bitcoin‑doubling ruse and to extort victims.