Alleged 17-Year-Old Twitter Hack Mastermind Pleads Not Guilty

Graham Ivan Clark, the 17-year-old resident of Tampa, Florida, who is accused of leading the hack of several celebrity Twitter accounts pleaded not guilty to all allegations on Tuesday in Hillsborough Circuit Court.

The court documents received by the news outlet accused Clark of 17 counts of communications fraud, 11 counts of illegal use of personal information, one count of organized fraud over $5,000 and one count of illegally accessing a computer or electronic device.

Clark along with 22-year-old Nima Fazeli of Orlando and Mason Sheppard, 19 of the United Kingdom allegedly carried out the hack in July to gain access to at least 130 Twitter accounts of high-profile people and companies including Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Apple, among others.

The perpetrators allegedly used the accounts to post tweets asking people to send any amount of Bitcoin to a specified wallet address, promising them they would receive double the amount in return.

They were able to dupe Twitters users of almost $117,000 in about three hours of the hack.

The two others involved in the hack, Fazeli and Sheppard, face similar charges in the California federal court.

He reportedly promised the two that he would access and take control of the Twitter accounts in return for Bitcoin transfers.

The two hackers had then purportedly posted the offer on OGUsers, a marketplace popular among hackers.

The FBI found that the data of OGUsers' was hacked in April and information such as public forum postings, private messages, internet addresses and email addresses were posted on the internet.

They then received the photos of a driver's licence of both the hackers, posted as a KYC document on the platform, and moved ahead with the arrest.