British national Joseph James O’Connor, who orchestrated the infamous July 2020 Twitter breach that compromised accounts belonging to Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others, has been ordered to repay about £4.1 million (approximately $5.4 million) in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) secured a civil recovery order on November 14, 2025, to seize 42 BTC and additional crypto assets tied to O’Connor’s scheme.
A court-appointed trustee will liquidate the assets once they are recovered.
O’Connor, 26, pleaded guilty in the U.S. in 2023 to a range of offenses including computer intrusion, wire fraud, and extortion.
He originally stole an estimated $794,000 worth of cryptocurrency by taking control of celebrity accounts through social engineering, then tweeting fraudulent messages promising to “double” any Bitcoin sent.
The July 2020 hack exploited Twitter’s internal tools: O’Connor tricked some Twitter employees into giving him access, allowing him and his co-conspirators to send tweets from more than 130 high-profile accounts, including those of Obama, Biden, Musk, Gates, Kim Kardashian, and others.
Adrian Foster, Chief Crown Prosecutor for CPS’s Proceeds of Crime Division, said the recovery order demonstrates that “even when someone is not convicted in the UK … we are still able to ensure they do not benefit from their criminality.”
O’Connor was arrested in Spain in 2021 and extradited to the U.S. after Spanish authorities agreed to hand him over. During his sentence, U.S. courts also ordered him to pay $794,012.64 in restitution to his victims.
