A 20-year-old Florida man on the heart of a prolific cybercrime group referred to as “Scattered Spider” was sentenced to 10 years in federal jail right this moment, and ordered to pay roughly $13 million in restitution to victims.
Noah Michael City of Palm Coast, Fla. pleaded responsible in April 2025 to costs of wire fraud and conspiracy. Florida prosecutors alleged City conspired with others to steal at the least $800,000 from 5 victims through SIM-swapping assaults that diverted their cell phone calls and textual content messages to units managed by City and his co-conspirators.
A reserving picture of Noah Michael City launched by the Volusia County Sheriff.
Though prosecutors had requested for City to serve eight years, Jacksonville information outlet News4Jax.com reviews the federal choose within the case right this moment opted to condemn City to 120 months in federal jail, ordering him to pay $13 million in restitution and endure three years of supervised launch after his sentence is accomplished.
In November 2024 City was charged by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles as one in all 5 members of Scattered Spider (a.okay.a. “Oktapus,” “Scatter Swine” and “UNC3944”), which specialised in SMS and voice phishing assaults that tricked workers at sufferer corporations into coming into their credentials and one-time passcodes at phishing web sites. City pleaded responsible to at least one depend of conspiracy to commit wire fraud within the California case, and the $13 million in restitution is meant to cowl victims from each circumstances.
The focused SMS scams spanned a number of months throughout the summer time of 2022, asking workers to click on a hyperlink and log in at an internet site that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication web page. Some SMS phishing messages informed workers their VPN credentials had been expiring and wanted to be modified; different missives suggested workers about modifications to their upcoming work schedule.
That phishing spree netted City and others entry to greater than 130 corporations, together with Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, MailChimp, and Plex. The federal government says the group used that entry to steal proprietary firm information and buyer data, and that members additionally phished folks to steal thousands and thousands of {dollars} value of cryptocurrency.
For a few years, City’s on-line hacker aliases “King Bob” and “Sosa” had been fixtures of the Com, a largely Telegram and Discord-based neighborhood of English-speaking cybercriminals whereby hackers boast loudly about high-profile exploits and hacks that nearly invariably start with social engineering. King Bob always bragged on the Com about stealing unreleased rap music recordings from in style artists, presumably by way of SIM-swapping assaults. A lot of these purloined tracks or “grails” he later bought or gave away on boards.
Noah “King Bob” City, posting to Twitter/X across the time of his sentencing right this moment.
Sosa additionally was energetic in a very damaging group of achieved felony SIM-swappers referred to as “Star Fraud.” Cyberscoop’s AJ Vicens reported in 2023 that people inside Star Fraud had been doubtless concerned within the high-profile Caesars Leisure and MGM Resorts extortion assaults that very same yr.
The Star Fraud SIM-swapping group gained the power to quickly transfer focused cell numbers to units they managed by always phishing workers of the key cell suppliers. In February 2023, KrebsOnSecurity revealed information taken from the Telegram channels for Star Fraud and two different SIM-swapping teams displaying these crooks targeted on SIM-swapping T-Cell clients, and that they collectively claimed inner entry to T-Cell on 100 separate events over a 7-month interval in 2022.
Reached through one in all his King Bob accounts on Twitter/X, City known as the sentence unjust, and stated the choose in his case discounted his age as an element.
“The choose purposefully ignored my age as an element due to the actual fact one other Scattered Spider member hacked him personally throughout the course of my case,” City stated in reply to questions, noting that he was sending the messages from a Florida county jail. “He ought to have been eliminated as a choose a lot earlier on. However staying in county jail is torture.”
A court docket transcript (PDF) from a standing listening to in February 2025 exhibits City was telling the reality concerning the hacking incident that occurred whereas he was in federal custody. It concerned an intrusion right into a Justice of the Peace choose’s e-mail account, the place a duplicate of City’s sealed indictment was stolen. The choose informed attorneys for either side {that a} co-defendant within the California case was looking for out about Mr. City’s exercise within the Florida case.
“What it in the end was a was an enormous fake pas,” Choose Harvey E. Schlesinger stated. “The Courtroom’s password…enterprise is dealt with by an out of doors contractor. And any individual known as the skin contractor representing Choose Toomey saying, ‘I want a password change.’ And so they gave out the password change. That’s how whoever was making the cellphone name bought into the court docket.”
