L.A. man charged with hacking Instagram influencer accounts, feds say

A Los Angeles man has been arrested and charged on suspicion of hacking into Instagram accounts belonging to feminine influencers in an effort to extort cash and interact in sexual video chats throughout an almost four-year interval, federal prosecutors mentioned.

Amir Hossein Golshan, 24, was charged Thursday with two counts of wire fraud, one rely of unauthorized entry to a protected laptop to acquire info, one rely of accessing a pc to defraud and procure worth, one rely of aggravated identification theft and one rely of threatening to break a protected laptop, prosecutors from the U.S. legal professional’s workplace for the Central District of California said in a statement.

The indictment says Golshan would use “SIM swapping,” a way by which a cellphone quantity related to one SIM card is fraudulently reassigned to a special SIM card, to ship the influencers’ Instagram password reset codes to a cellphone in his possession. As soon as logged into the accounts of his alleged targets, Golshan would impersonate them and ask their buddies for cash, gathering $15,000 from buddies of 1 account.

In different situations, he “extorted the victims for cash and sexually specific chats to return the victims’ social media accounts,” in accordance with the indictment.

Golshan allegedly demanded a $5,000 fee from one sufferer and advised her that she would regain management of her Instagram account “if she initiated a video name and stripped for him.”

He additionally allegedly charged different victims a whole lot of {dollars} for “verified badges, realizing that he couldn’t present the verified badges he presupposed to promote,” the indictment claims.

If convicted, Golshan’s most sentence can be 20 years in federal jail for every of the 2 counts of wire fraud towards him. The opposite 4 prices carry extra shorter sentences.

At his arraignment listening to Friday within the U.S. District Court docket in Los Angeles, Golshan pleaded not responsible, mentioned Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesman for the U.S. legal professional’s workplace. His trial date was scheduled for April 18.