A college student hacker is arrested on suspicion that he took over dozens of cell phone numbers and stole more than 500 million yen

On July 12, 2018 California police suspected hacking a large number of cell phone numbers and stealed more than 5 million dollars (about 560 million yen) of virtual currency, suspected of being a university student Joel Ortiz in Boston We arrested the person. Ortiz is a member of the criminal group and is believed to have hacked the number of more than 40 mobile phones with the help of anonymous conspirators.

'TELL YOUR DAD TO GIVE US BITCOIN:' How a Hacker Allegedly Stole Millions by Hijacking Phone Numbers - Motherboard
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3q7mz/hacker-allegedly-stole-millions-bitcoin-sim-swapping

Ortiz is charged with 28 cases of personal information theft 13 cases, 13 hacks, 2 thefts, and according to a statement submitted to the court by the police, the total damage is 5 million dollars (about 560 million Yen) or more. Police also claimed that Ortiz not only hacked SIM for virtual currency purposes but also sold the acquired SNS accounts, etc. in bit coins.

In February and March of 2018, Ortiz suspected a SIM swap targeting investors and entrepreneurs, hijacked the telephone number, reset the password in a moment, then set Google 2-step verification program I took over my account.

One of the victimized entrepreneurs told Motherboard 's interview: "When we were at the conference, all the people on the spot suddenly stopped moving, and on that day the mobile SIM I understood that it was hacked. " According to a court document, Ortiz had grasped the entrepreneur's mobile phone number, reset the entrepreneur's Gmail password, and made it possible to access the entrepreneur's virtual currency account. Entrepreneur hurriedly contacted the telecommunications company AT & T , but it was after all the virtual currencies owned by entrepreneurs were taken away.

In addition, from calling investor's wife from the stolen mobile phone number or sending a harassment email to investor's daughter "Please persuade your father to give me a bit coin" from California The Enforcement Computer team, a special forces of state police, began to move. The following image is a screen where SMS is actually exchanged between investor's daughter and hacker.

In order to track hackers, the agent sent a warrant to AT & T to submit all the call records of the day the hacker placed control of the investor's mobile phone number. According to the records provided by AT & T, it turned out that this number was used from Samsung mobile phones. When I asked investors, I heard that Samsung mobile phones did not remember at all, and this cell phone declared a hacker's phone and identified the mobile phone's identification number ( IMEI ). And when the police sent a warrant to AT & T to check the phone number that the same IMEI mobile phone was sending, about 40 cases were detected.

Police cooperated with Google and Microsoft and got three email addresses tied to hacker's mobile phone's IMEI, such as Gmail count and Microsoft Lice account. The presence of Ortiz suspected from these three addresses. In these mail addresses we found that Ortiz had received e-mails indicating buying domains that they were used for phishing attacks, e-mails explaining how to exploit SIM swaps, and so on. It is the first time that the police obtained data and accounts related to the IMEI number from Google.

Further investigation showed that more than 1 million dollars (about 110 million yen) was deposited in the account owned by Ortiz at the virtual currency exchange such as Coinbase, Bittrex, Binance. Of these, police seized 250,000 dollars (about 28 million yen) of virtual currencies from Ortiz, but it is clearly insufficient given the total damage. At the time of article creation, it is still unknown where the remaining virtual currency was sent, and the existence of a criminal group is suggested in the background of Ortiz.

Ortiz was arrested for trying to head to Europe at Los Angeles International Airport. According to investigators, Ortiz seemed to have a luxury bag of Gucci as if she arrested himself. Motherboard claimed Ortiz 's attorney for comment, but he said he did not answer.