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Ho Joon Jia is accused of stealing personal data, as well as the computing power of cloud services.
29-year-old Singaporean citizen Ho Joon Jia, also known as Matthew Ho, has been charged with allegedly cryptocurrency mining using fake email accounts and stolen computing power from Amazon AWS and Google Cloud.
According to the indictment, from October 2017 to February 2018, after the popularity and value of cryptocurrencies grew, the accused carried out a large-scale campaign to extract cryptocurrency through fraud and identity theft. Ho allegedly used stolen personal information and credit card information from a well-known California-based video game developer to create accounts for several cloud services in the United States.
The suspect used accounts for mining various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ho created a network of fake email accounts and used social engineering methods to trick cloud providers into gaining elevated privileges in an account, increasing computer processing power and storage, and avoiding paying bills.
Computing power was used to mine cryptocurrency, which Ho then used or exchanged for currency at various online sites. For several months, the attacker used the resources of cloud computing for $ 5 million as part of mining. Ho also used the personal data of one of the residents of Texas, as well as the founder of a tech company in India, to create accounts in Google cloud services, which he similarly used for cryptocurrency mining.
In total, on all counts the man faces more than 20 years in prison.