The Bill Comes Due for a Notorious Hack

Remember when Tesla CEO Elon Musk's Twitter account started shilling a Bitcoin scam back in 2020? It wasn't just Musk. Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, and a parade of other boldface names suddenly appeared to be hawking a crypto scheme promising to double your Bitcoin (BTC) if you just sent some first. Classic scam, unprecedented scale.

Now the person behind that digital heist is being forced to cough up the proceeds. UK prosecutors announced Monday that Joseph James O'Connor, a British citizen, has been hit with a Civil Recovery Order requiring him to return 42 Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies—currently valued at around £4.1 million, or roughly $5.4 million.

How They Got the Money Back

The Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales worked with authorities in the United States and Spain to track down O'Connor's crypto stash and secure the recovery order. The November 14, 2025 order means a court-appointed trustee will now liquidate the cryptocurrency assets, effectively preventing O'Connor from playing hide-and-seek with his ill-gotten gains.

O'Connor is already serving time in the U.S. for his role in the scheme, which involved not just the Twitter hack but also SIM swap attacks to steal cryptocurrency and threats to expose private images and messages of various victims.

When Twitter Became a Crime Scene

The hack itself was genuinely wild. In July 2020, dozens of verified accounts—including those belonging to Obama, Bezos, Tesla and SpaceX chief Musk, and then-candidate Joe Biden—simultaneously posted tweets promoting a Bitcoin scam. Send crypto to this address, the tweets promised, and you'd get double back. (Spoiler: you wouldn't.)

The tweets were eventually deleted, but not before the scammers made off with a substantial haul. O'Connor was extradited to the United States and pleaded guilty to the charges in May 2023. According to the Justice Department, his tactics included SIM swap attacks—where hackers hijack your phone number to bypass security—along with direct computer intrusions to commandeer social media accounts.

The recovery order represents one of the more successful efforts to claw back cryptocurrency stolen in high-profile cybercrimes, showing that even in the supposedly anonymous world of digital assets, law enforcement can eventually follow the money.