A US court has sentenced 22 year old SIM-swapper Daniel Akira Mills to 2 years in prison for being part of a gang that stole cryptocurrency worth more than USD600,000 in total from dozens of victims. In addition to the prison sentence, Mills was also ordered to pay over USD530,000 in restitution to his victims.
SIM swaps were first used to hijack the phone services of individuals targeted by Mills and his gang. The SIM-swapped accounts were typically transferred to phones controlled by Mills. Co-conspirators then worked with Mills to use the compromised phone services to gain control of other accounts belonging to victims.
In addition to raiding cryptocurrency wallets, the prosecutor’s press release mentions some of the other online services that were abused by the gang.
Among other things, scheme participants posted unauthorized messages on their victims’ social media accounts and posted private photographs stolen from the accounts of celebrities.
The stolen images included nude photographs of victims. Before they were posted online, the nudes would be defaced using Mills’ online nickname of ‘Xu’ and the aliases of other gang members. This was done to signify who deserved ‘credit’ for the crimes.
Regular readers of Commsrisk will hardly need telling that this is yet another example of a young man who used SIM swap fraud as a gateway to serious crimes that have devastating consequences for victims. Mills’ crime spree began in August 2019, when he was still a teenager. The specialist high-technology REACT Task Force of Santa Clara, California, was once again involved in this investigation, although Mills lived and was prosecuted in Texas. It is good to see that US law enforcement is stepping up to the task of catching and punishing SIM swappers. However, a similar level of effort needs to be applied to prosecuting other abuses of comms networks, and more must be done to educate impressionable boys about the seriousness of these crimes.
