Financial Crime Weekly: Man Pleads Guilty To Hacking SEC Social Media Account, Two Plead Guilty In $577 Million Crypto Fraud Scheme

Man Pleads Guilty To Hacking SEC Social Media Account

The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday announced that Eric Council pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft in a federal court in Washington, D.C.. Council is accused of hacking the SEC's X account and posting a fake Bitcoin exchange-traded fund approval message. 

The Details: According to court documents, Council and other conspirators gained control of the SEC's X account through an unauthorized Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) swap, a process of fraudulently reassigning a cell phone number from the legitimate subscriber or user's SIM card to a SIM card controlled by a criminal actor. 

Read Next: Robert F. Kennedy, Vaccine Skeptic, Confirmed As Trump’s Secretary Of Health: Health Care Stocks To Watch

The defendant's co-conspirators then accessed the SEC Chairman's X account and posted a fake message that Bitcoin ETFs had received approval. Council received payment in bitcoin from his co-conspirators for his role in the fraud.  

Council faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and is scheduled to be sentenced on May 16, 2025.

Two Men Plead Guilty In $577 MIllion Crypto Fraud Case 

Two Estonian nationals pleaded guilty on Wednesday for their operation of a multi-faceted cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme. The defendants also agreed to forfeit assets valued over $400 million obtained during the conspiracy as part of the plea deal. 

The Details: According to court documents, Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turõgin sold contracts to customers entitling them to a share of cryptocurrency mined by the defendants' purported cryptocurrency mining service, HashFlare.

However, Hashflare did not have the computing power to perform most of the mining operations they told clients it performed. Between 2015 and 2019, Hashflare's sales totaled more than $577 million. 

Potapenko and Turõgin each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud with sentencing scheduled on May 8 and face up to 20 years in prison. 

Read Next:

• Explosion Rocks Chernobyl Nuclear Site As Zelenskyy Signals Readiness For Peace Talks 

Image: Shutterstock