The Minecraft Hacker That SHUT DOWN Twitter

On july 31st of 2020 this face made waves across the internet just two weeks earlier its owner was the mastermind behind the largest hack in twitter history responsible for over a hundred thousand dollars of stolen bitcoin and 130 thieved twitter accounts from the likes of kanye west elon musk bill gates

Mr beast former u.s president barack obama and current u.s president joe biden but this incident wasn’t the first time this man or more accurately boy was thrust into the internet spotlight in today’s episode of minecraft uncovered we’ll be taking a look at the story of graham ivan clark better known as open

Hcf in the descent of a minecraft youtuber into fraud our story begins in 2013 years before graham ever made his way into the minecraft community but the year was important because even though he got his start much later his background and community began here minecraft hardcore

Factions better known as hcf hcf was an offshoot of the factions game mode that had appeared two years earlier on a server known as massive craft where you built and raided massive bases in the pursuit of unrivaled wealth and power on your quest to become the largest faction

In the world the game mode was easy to get into and understand simply create a team claim some land build and protect your empire and destroy all who stand in your way but see this last part is where hcf differed where raiding and factions largely consisted of shooting cannons

Into the defenses of a base to hopefully penetrate through hcf rating was based entirely around pvp or player versus player combat turning hcf servers into a highly competitive often toxic and sometimes shady environment promoting what was once known as the most grueling and unforgiving game mode in all of

Minecraft three years later this is where graham got his start on august 24th of 2016 the open hcf youtube channel was launched where a 13 year old gram would upload content revolving around hardcore factions and competitive minecraft combat on a variety of servers but while he quickly gained an audience

From a minecraft account giveaway his success didn’t last long starting in october of 2016 less than two months after his channel opened other members of the community began to expose graham for shady practices behind the scenes including faked giveaways staged videos racist and disrespectful behavior scamming other players stealing the

Personal information of his rivals and launching ddos attacks on them some pretty bad stuff for a minecraft player who was for all intents and purposes a child open took aim at everyone friends enemies fans and rivals even those he worked with and while he had a small

Community defending him at first as the months went on and more accusations came out open’s reputation was damaged beyond repair by february of 2017 the open hcf channel had gone inactive and graham himself having been banned or blacklisted from nearly every server in the community began to fade away his

Memory withering in the minds of players that never really got a chance to know him in the first place at the turn of the year the channel was presumably sold or given away receiving a spike in activity and rebranding to juvoy an elias apparently belonging to a fortnite

Creator for a short period of time before he too went inactive in november of 2018 the last videos on the former open hcf channel were erased going completely private and in the middle of april 2019 the channel was suddenly wiped off of youtube never to be seen

Again graham on the other hand hadn’t quite disappeared instead he had simply shifted his focus this time to a life of cybercrime graham’s first ventures into the world of cyber crime were long before he participated in what’s now known as the bitcoin twitter hack of 2020. no the

First serious heirs of our good friend open hcf came back in 2018 just over a year after he was ousted from the minecraft hcf community that was when graham joined an online marketplace known as og users centered around the trading of og online usernames essentially any screen name that was

Considered valuable because of its simplicity or visual appeal these tended to be well-known english words references to pop culture or common first names it was only natural that graham would be attracted to a site like this after all graham had owned the minecraft names open and feed back in

His hcf days suggesting he was already somewhat familiar with the trade but along with this niche collector’s hobby was a criminal underworld involving the theft of not just rare names and accounts but personal information finances and worse unfortunately for graham he quickly fell into the seedier part of the community and continued his

Descent into a world of crime he was banned from the site after just four days but he would continue to make connections with other members of the community and was pulled along with them on various criminal escapades leading to his first run-in with the law meet greg bennett greg has worked in the

Tech and health industries for the last 45 years most famously as the founder of hbsi the largest american hospital benchmarking company and most recently as an angel investor putting money into entrepreneurs and new companies with the money he made from his own ventures in exchange for partial ownership or some

Other benefit but since 2017 greg has also been involved with cryptocurrency which made him a target on april 15th of 2019 that target was hit that was the day that a group of unknown hackers carried out a sim-swapping attack on bennett where bad actors stole access to

His phone number before using it to request access to his private account on bitfinex a crypto exchange that held an estimated 400 bitcoin due to slow acting on the part of the exchange the hackers managed to drain 164 of the 400 coins an amount worth a bit under a million at

The time but over 6 million dollars today of course it doesn’t have to be said but among the hackers was graham himself who seems to have orchestrated the attack in the first place and attempted to extort the victim for even greater treasures bennett would go on to

Recover the accounts to the best of his ability suing his exchange in the process but it would be a full year before any of the attackers were apprehended in april of 2020 exactly a year since the initial attack the united states secret service seized 100 bitcoin from graham ivan clarke the man himself

And returned the currency to its rightful owner a whopping 64 bitcoin or roughly 500 000 at the time has gone unaccounted for graham was released because of his status as a minor and any other potential hackers seem to have evaded the authorities but generally speaking the case was as close to

Resolved as it would likely ever get leaving bennett bitfinex and the secret service satisfied but not graham by this time graham was already living well with his own classy apartment in tampa the jewelry and vehicles of a celebrity and more expensive tech in his home than

Most people will see in a lifetime but he wanted more and with a massive chunk of his stolen income drained from him he would need to devise a new plan to satisfy his greed just two weeks later graham got to work on his largest heist yet it was time to take on twitter

On may 3rd it began graham acting alone began a process of painstaking research into twitter’s behind the scenes staff he spent weeks on weeks scraping linkedin an online business network for the profiles of twitter employees that could potentially hold access to the admin panel then he was able to use

Special job recruitment features on the site to find their phone numbers and other private information once their private info was saved he moved on to the public sources collecting as much data as he could from random sites and twitter itself as to how the company functioned on the inside and that was it

Graham had everything he needed it was time for action he started simply enough by calling the private numbers of twitter employees and attempting to convince them he was part of the i.t department fixing a problem with the internal twitter network remember this was in the middle of covet 19. twitter

Employees weren’t meeting at the coffee machine every day in the office they were working from home where it wouldn’t be quite as easy to just walk up to a co-worker and ask them what’s up eventually he managed to gain their trust and that’s where the plan moved to

Phase two here graham had set up a web page the first of two though the second is much more well known this first page looked innocuous enough to the untrained eye it would probably look like nothing important and to the trained eye of a twitter employee it would look like the

Company’s own internal twitter vpn but to the most trained eye at that time only graham himself it was a disguise behind which hid some basic code to steal the login info of twitter staff as they entered it even the two-factor authentication twitter had put into place wasn’t enough to stop him graham

Moved their info from the fake site to the real one within seconds before the one-time security code could expire once the employees were duped into dishing out their login grim was in immediately he got to work with the first stage of the hack the far simpler and easier of

The two which was the theft of og one character twitter usernames he recruited the aid of two members off og users for this part the first being cheiwan real name mason shepard and the second being rolex real name nima fazeli since graham had been banned off of og users he

Needed someone to advertise his shall we call them services shaiwan was in charge of that and he did his job well charging 250 per email behind a rare twitter account and receiving at least two clients within the first eight hours rolex on the other hand seems to have

Been behind the finances of the scheme his driver’s license was used to register the coinbase that held their profits but clearly for graham this gig wasn’t enough maybe the profits were small maybe business was slow maybe he thought time was running out before twitter found out but suddenly for the

Mastermind of the twitter hack plans changed at three o’clock eastern the twitter account of the binance crypto exchange suddenly sent out a new tweet we have partnered with crypto for health and are giving back 5 000 bitcoin to the community but that was just the start

And over the next two or so hours 130 accounts would be compromised 45 of which were used to promote a scam promising to double any bitcoin sent to a loan coinbase address or through a crypto for health scam website launched earlier that day from what we can tell

Chaiwan and rolex were completely in the dark on this essentially graham went rogue and cheiwan and rolex went ghost it took three hours for twitter to stop the hack in its entirety by that time coinbase had already blacklisted the scam addresses and over 3 000 tweets contained a mention of the scam but

Despite the somewhat quick resolution finding the perpetrators was not going to be as easy it took over two weeks for the three to be connected with the hack after a large-scale investigation by the fbi the senate select committee on intelligence in the national cyber security center in the uk but on july

31st the department of justice announced the arrest of all three involved in the hack mason shepard or shaewan from the uk charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering multiple counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and the intentional access of a protected computer nema fazeli or rolex got off

Quite easy with just the charge of aiding and abetting the access graham however as the ringleader wasn’t quite so lucky graham ivan clarke has been charged with organized fraud over fifty thousand dollars accessing a protected computer without authority 11 counts of identity theft and 17 counts of communications fraud he pleaded not

Guilty on august 4th of 2020 but by march he accepted a plea deal requiring him to serve time as a youthful offender under florida law on april 5th of 2021 graham ivan clarke was admitted to the lake city correctional facility of florida where he’s serving time today his release date is scheduled for

February 24th 2023 hi it’s me aiden or mcb in a rare sort of one-on-one with the camera or in this case the shure sm7b microphone and obs but basically i just wanted to express a huge thanks to all of you the channel has been doing phenomenally my last few

Videos did really well except for the ones that didn’t but that’s fine and uh overall the channel’s in a really great spot i’m super happy with it i’m gonna try my best to keep consistent weekly uploads from now on i know i have said that many times but i had a sort of

Burst in motivation recently and i spent like six hours a day just on the script for this video alone and i suspect i’ll probably spend the same amount of time on recording and editing because i really want to get this up by thursday and it’s monday right now also and i’m

Adding this in post so sorry if my voice sounds different but regarding the topic of this video in particular there was a surprisingly good documentary made on gram by the new york times it’s a hulu exclusive but there’s a re-upload on youtube as well at the moment so watch

At your own risk i’ll leave the official link in the description stick around after the video as well there’s a few bonus clips of the zoom calls for the hearings of graham rolex and shaewon which were all bomb done recording and uh it’s pretty entertaining but yeah

Again just wanted to say huge thanks for all the support it’s super motivating and very much appreciated and uh yeah love you all thanks for watching and have a good one peace peace Uh When the funds were unfrozen mr clark did move him off of the bitmex platform because anyone would oh my slime i know you really don’t know man i’m like that but i was wondering flat i could purchase i still fan just a bit of grub modular i want to

Know what your prices are saying because i’m trying to blemish you up with my boy damn gowdam g he’s like you feel me so get back to me because i know like there’s a top dog around there sorry i’m removing people as quickly as i can whenever a disruption happens mr

Weiss brought no worries understood so