Hack of SEC social media account earns 14-month prison sentence for Alabama man
The 25-year-old Alabama man who executed a SIM-swap attack to allow access to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) account on social media platform X will spend more than a year in prison for the incident.
Eric Council Jr. had pleaded guilty in February to federal charges of conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud. The January 2024 attack resulted in fraudulent posts on the SEC’s account that altered the market value of bitcoin.
Washington, D.C.-based Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Council on Friday to 14 months in prison and ordered the forfeiture of $50,000. After completing the prison sentence, Council will have “three years of supervised release with the condition that he not use computers to access the dark web or commit further identity fraud,” according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
Council was arrested in October and was facing a prison sentence of up to five years.
As part of the scheme, he used an ID card printer to impersonate the user of a government phone connected to the SEC’s account on X, prosecutors said. At an AT&T store in Huntsville, Alabama, he persuaded an employee to provide a replacement SIM card for the phone.
He then “walked to a nearby Apple store where he purchased a new iPhone. He inserted the SIM card to activate the phone, received the @SECGov X password reset codes on this new phone linked to the victim’s SIM card and used his personal cell phone to take a photo of the @SECgov X account reset code to share with his co-conspirators,” prosecutors said. He later returned the phone for cash.
An unnamed co-conspirator “used the reset code to gain access to the @SECGov X account and issue a fraudulent post in the name of the then-SEC Chairman, falsely announcing SEC approval of Bitcoin (BTC) Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs),” prosecutors said. “The price of BTC increased by more than $1,000 following the post. Shortly after, the SEC regained control over their X account and confirmed that the announcement was unauthorized and the result of a security breach, which caused the value of BTC to decrease by more than $2,000.”
Council received $50,000 to execute the SIM swap, prosecutors said.
Joe Warminsky
is the news editor for Recorded Future News. He has more than 25 years experience as an editor and writer in the Washington, D.C., area. He previously he helped lead CyberScoop for more than five years. Prior to that, he was a digital editor at WAMU 88.5, the NPR affiliate in Washington, and he spent more than a decade editing coverage of Congress for CQ Roll Call.