DOJ announces charges against two other suspects in the Twitter hack, including a 19-year-old in UK and a 22-year-old in Orlando, Florida
I am employed as a Special Agent … Tweets: JadedKushner / @jarradkushner : I'm too old to understand this stuff 😂 Twitter hackers complaints... >Mason Sheppard https://www.justice.gov/... >Nima Fazeli https://www.justice.gov/... @file411 : Link to Mason Shepherd's July 23, 2020 Complaint https://justice.gov/...... link Nima Fazel July 31, 2020 Complaint https://justice.gov/...... the 3rd is a juvenile I'm refraining from using his name because it's a red line for me- whispers check FL laws on juvi charged as adult Zora Suleman / @zorasuleman : Three people including a 19y/o from Britain, have been charged in the US over a hack of high profile #Twitter users earlier this month.The US Department of Justice said Mason Sheppard, from Bognor Regis faces three charges. Masons criminal complaint form: https://www.justice.gov/... https://twitter.com/... Matthew Zeitlin / @mattzeitlin : I don't like to get political on here but one isssue I have a strong opinion on is that government documents should be mandated to be as readable as possible, at least let us ctrl+f https://twitter.com/... @briankrebs : DOJ says two more in addition to the 17-y/o from Tampa were arrested in connection with the Twitter hack. One of them — Mason/Chaewon, aka Mason Sheppard of the UK — was mentioned in both my stories on the July 15 incident. https://www.justice.gov/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : Charging document of 17 year old says use of verified accounts was use of “personal identification information.” Damn blue checks getting more privileges everyday smh https://twitter.com/... @anthony : Justice Department announces 2 others have been charged as well: A 19-year-old in the United Kingdom and a 22-year-old from Orlando, Florida https://www.justice.gov/... https://twitter.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : Rolex, one of the people who also used moniker Awkward, active earlier today, according to OGUsers posts https://www.vice.com/...? https://twitter.com/... Charles Arthur / @charlesarthur : All kicking off, as they say. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement completes the charging picture for the July 15 Twitter breach: hours earlier, a Florida state attorney had filed 30 felony state charges against the 17-year-old arrested in Tampa, and the DOJ now adds a federal layer with Mason Sheppard (19, UK) and Nima Fazeli (22, Orlando) named in parallel complaints.
The case has kept unfolding since — sources later pointed to a fourth suspect whose home was searched under seal ([[a:957478]]), and the eventual five-year sentence for Joseph James O'Connor showed these charges end in real prison time, not just indictments.
First-order effects
- Sheppard and Fazeli now face US federal prosecution from separate countries, joining the Tampa teenager's state charges to make this a three-jurisdiction case — Florida state, US federal, and UK cooperation over Sheppard's extradition exposure.
- Twitter's high-profile compromised accounts become evidence in two DOJ complaints filed the same week as the state case, locking the company into a prolonged criminal proceeding rather than a single-defendant matter.
Second-order effects
- Platforms moved against the resale market rather than only the hackers: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter's coordinated takedown of top OGUsers forum members targeted the account-hijacking marketplace where breached handles like these were monetized, squeezing the buyer side the indictment implies.
- US-UK joint charging here establishes a working template prosecutors reused on later Anglo-American cases — the same bilateral structure appears in the recent charges against a Scattered Spider-linked UK teen and the UK arrests over the M&S and Co-op hacks.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, loosely affiliated crews of late-teens running social-engineering attacks get treated as persistent criminal organizations rather than one-off incidents — with deterrence anchored by sentences like O'Connor's five years and repeat jurisdictional playbooks across US and UK courts.
The trend: Cross-border prosecutions are steadily converting ad-hoc teenage hacking crews into named, sentenced criminal organizations, with the Twitter hack case serving as the template.