A 20-year-old Florida man on the heart of a prolific cybercrime group often known as “Scattered Spider” was sentenced to 10 years in federal jail at the 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 expenses of wire fraud and conspiracy. Florida prosecutors alleged City conspired with others to steal a minimum of $800,000 from 5 victims through SIM-swapping assaults that diverted their cell phone calls and textual content messages to gadgets 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 studies the federal choose within the case at the 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 certainly one of 5 members of Scattered Spider (a.okay.a. “Oktapus,” “Scatter Swine” and “UNC3944”), which specialised in SMS and voice phishing assaults that tricked staff at sufferer corporations into coming into their credentials and one-time passcodes at phishing web sites. City pleaded responsible to at least one rely of conspiracy to commit wire fraud within the California case, and the $13 million in restitution is meant to cowl victims from each instances.
The focused SMS scams spanned a number of months throughout the summer time of 2022, asking staff 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 staff their VPN credentials had been expiring and wanted to be modified; different missives suggested staff 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 hundreds of 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 principally Telegram and Discord-based group of English-speaking cybercriminals whereby hackers boast loudly about high-profile exploits and hacks that nearly invariably start with social engineering. King Bob continuously bragged on the Com about stealing unreleased rap music recordings from common artists, presumably by means of SIM-swapping assaults. Lots 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 at the moment.
Sosa additionally was energetic in a very damaging group of achieved legal SIM-swappers often known 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 flexibility to briefly transfer focused cellular numbers to gadgets they managed by continuously phishing staff of the most important cellular suppliers. In February 2023, KrebsOnSecurity revealed information taken from the Telegram channels for Star Fraud and two different SIM-swapping teams displaying these crooks centered 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 certainly one of his King Bob accounts on Twitter/X, City referred to 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 very 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 reveals 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 electronic 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 finally changed into a was a giant fake pas,” Choose Harvey E. Schlesinger stated. “The Courtroom’s password…enterprise is dealt with by an out of doors contractor. And any person referred to 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 telephone name bought into the court docket.”
