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Teen ‘mastermind’ accused of crippling Twitter hack is linked to deadly home robbery

Graham Ivan Clark, 17, faces multiple charges over the bitcoin Twitter hack: via REUTERS
Graham Ivan Clark, 17, faces multiple charges over the bitcoin Twitter hack: via REUTERS

A Florida teenager who is accused of participating in last month’s Twitter bitcoin scam, which saw several of the world’s highest-profile accounts hacked, has reportedly been linked to an attempted robbery that ended in a lethal shooting.

An investigation by the Tampa Bay Times has found that 17-year-old Graham Ivan Clark, who is credited by police as one of the “masterminds” of the scam, has also been named in the case of a burglary seven months ago that saw one teenager killed and another wounded.

The violent incident took place in January. According to local police, it began when two teenagers from Tampa’s Gaither High School broke into an apartment, one holding a gun; a resident shot them both, and one of them died. Two other teenagers were stopped at the same building, and remain suspects in the incident.

The Times quotes a local state attorney saying that while Clark “was not in the apartment when the shooting took place”, his involvement in other investigations jived with his being “the mastermind of a sophisticated global fraud”.

Clark is one of three people charged in relation with the Twitter hacking, one of the most serious security breaches in the platform’s history, which saw the profiles of people including Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and many more hijacked to fraudulently solicit bitcoin payments.

The scam’s perpetrators apparently sold access to some of the accounts, and Twitter had to take the drastic step of temporarily suspending all verified accounts while it established what had happened and tried to secure what had been breached.

Clark now faces 30 felony charges in the case. Two other men – 22-year-old Nima Fazeli and 19-year-old Mason Sheppard – are accused of benefiting from the hack and have been charged in California federal court.