The Crowd Machine hacking case that happened last week created a great deal of hassle and two suspects have been arrested in Oklahoma. The suspects have stolen an estimated 14 million USD. Two suspected men were arrested in Oklahoma regarding the crowd machine hacking case. The two suspects were identified as Joseph Harris, 21 and Fletcher Robert Childers, 23. Both of them were from Missouri and were arrested at the west side on 24th of this September.
Suspects executed the SIM swapping technique in order to steal the identity as well as the phone number of the victim. Crowd Machine is a San Jose California based company which was attacked by hackers on September 22nd, 2018. The blockchain company promptly informed the law enforcement about the attack and all the CMCT tokens were suspended on an immediate basis from most of the exchanges. Because of the incident, the CMCT token value dropped by 87%.
The company has stated that they held 1.5 billion tokens in reserve and 500 million tokens were released into the market. The hackers attacked and transferred 1 billion tokens to different exchanges. The CEO of the company Craig Sproule has stated that the investors who purchase the stolen tokens without being aware of them would be honoured. As of now, he confirmed the arrest of two suspects. He also stated that they are working with the law enforcement and are helping as much as they can for the investigation.
As soon as the investigators established the fact that a phone was used in this process, they tracked the device to Oklahoma. The device was tracked to an area near the Springhill Suites Hotel. The phone was bought at Walmart and when the CCTV footage of Walmart was checked, it was noticed that two white males brought the phone on the 18th of September.
The suspect vehicle was also recorded in the video and that vehicle was registered under the name of Childers. A hotel room was booked under the name of Harris on the 17th of September and the checkout date was on September 25th. This evidence led to the arrest of the two suspects Harris and Childers based on the warrant issued by Santa Clara County. The charges were identity theft, grand theft and intrusion of a computer.
The quick action taken by the law enforcement will act as a lesson to cybercriminals because the technology that they used for committing the crime helped law enforcement to get a hold of criminals.
