Three individuals were charged for their roles in the scam.

Authorities in Tampa, Florida have arrested 17 year-old Graham Clark for being the alleged “mastermind” behind the Twitter Bitcoin hack that targeted several high-profile accounts on July 15th, 2020.

Two other individuals were also charged for their alleged roles in the Twitter hack, according to the Department of Justice. They are Mason Sheppard (aka “Chaewon”), 19, of Bognor Regis in the United Kingdom, and Nima Fazeli (aka “Rolex”), 22, of Orlando, Florida. Sheppard was charged with “conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and the intentional access of a protected computer.” Fazeli, on the other hand, was charged for “aiding and abetting the intentional access of a protected computer.” Both Sheppard and Fazeli were charged in a criminal complaint in the Northern District of California

The Twitter hack on July 15th originally targeted Bitcoin-related accounts, but then expanded to include accounts of high-profile celebrities and politicians such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Joe Biden and even former president Barack Obama. The hacked tweets told their followers to send Bitcoin to a certain address, with the promised exchange of double the amount of Bitcoin in return.

According to Twitter, the hack was orchestrated via a phone spear phishing attack that targeted a few of its employees. The perpetrator then “used their credentials to access our internal systems and gain information about our processes.” There was a report that said access came from finding logins in a Slack channel, but Twitter has not confirmed it.

The company said that the attacker targeted 130 accounts, tweeted from 45 of them, accessed 36 DM inboxes and copied account data from 7. Twitter has said that it is now improving its “methods of detecting and preventing inappropriate access” to its internal systems and “prioritizing security work” across its teams.