Prosecutors allege that the phishing assaults ran from at the least September 2021 to April 2023. Throughout that point, the defendants despatched textual content messages to cellphones of workers of the focused firms that purported to return from the IT departments of their employers.
The textual content messages typically falsely warned that the workers’ accounts could be deactivated imminently except they clicked on hyperlinks to malicious websites that had been designed to appear like legit web sites utilized by sufferer firms. The phishing websites tried to lure the workers into offering confidential info, together with account login credentials. Some workers took the bait by visiting the websites, coming into their credentials, and authenticating their identities with two-factor authentication. Scattered Spider then entered the intercepted passwords and 2FA credentials into the legit websites and gained entry to the worker accounts.
As soon as inside focused firms’ networks, the defendants allegedly stole confidential info, together with private info, akin to account credentials, names, e mail addresses, and phone numbers. Prosecutors mentioned the defendants additionally used info stolen from hacked firms and elsewhere to entry cryptocurrency accounts or wallets of “quite a few people” and take tens of millions of {dollars}’ price of digital cash.
If convicted, every defendant faces a most sentence of 20 years in jail for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, as much as 5 years in federal jail for one depend of conspiracy, and a compulsory two-year consecutive jail sentence for aggravated id theft. Buchanan additionally faces as much as 20 years in jail if he’s convicted of wire fraud.
