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Orlando man arrested in connection with massive Twitter hack allowed bond

Nima Fazeli of Orlando charged in California federal court

ORLANDO, Fla. – In a hearing Monday, a judge granted bond for an accomplice of one of the nation’s most high-profile security breaches.

A California federal judge ordered 22-year-old Nima Fazeli to be held on a $50,000 bond.

Investigators arrested Fazeli, of Orlando, in July after Twitter accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities and technology moguls were hacked. The security breach scammed people around the globe out of more than $100,000 in Bitcoin, with authorities saying Fazeli and 19-year-old Mason Sheppard of the U.K. benefited from the hack.

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Investigators learned a Hillsborough County teen was the mastermind behind the cyber attack. Graham Ivan Clark, 17, is being prosecuted in the Tampa area. Court papers in the California cases say Fazeli and Sheppard brokered the sale of Twitter accounts stolen by a hacker.

The group commandeered the accounts of former vice president Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also hacked.

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Internal Revenue Service investigators in Washington, D.C., identified two of the defendants by analyzing Bitcoin transactions on the blockchain — the universal ledger that records Bitcoin transactions — that they had sought to make anonymous, federal prosecutors said.

There is no record of whether Fazeli posted bond or if he was released.


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