A 20-year-old Florida man on the heart of a prolific cybercrime group often called “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 expenses of wire fraud and conspiracy. Florida prosecutors alleged City conspired with others to steal no less than $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 photograph 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 stories 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 bear three years of supervised launch after his sentence is accomplished.
In November 2024 City was charged by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles as one among 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 rely 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 through the summer time of 2022, asking workers to click on a hyperlink and log in at a web site that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication web page. Some SMS phishing messages informed workers their VPN credentials have been expiring and wanted to be modified; different missives suggested workers about adjustments 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 individuals to steal thousands and thousands of {dollars} price of cryptocurrency.
For a few years, City’s on-line hacker aliases “King Bob” and “Sosa” have been fixtures of the Com, a principally 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 continuously bragged on the Com about stealing unreleased rap music recordings from fashionable artists, presumably via 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 right this moment.
Sosa additionally was lively in a very harmful group of achieved prison SIM-swappers often called “Star Fraud.” Cyberscoop’s AJ Vicens reported in 2023 that people inside Star Fraud have been seemingly 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 workers 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 targeted on SIM-swapping T-Cell clients, and that they collectively claimed inside entry to T-Cell on 100 separate events over a 7-month interval in 2022.
Reached through one among 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 through 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 courtroom 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 e-mail account, the place a replica 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 a giant fake pas,” Choose Harvey E. Schlesinger stated. “The Court docket’s password…enterprise is dealt with by an outdoor contractor. And anyone referred to as the skin contractor representing Choose Toomey saying, ‘I want a password change.’ They usually gave out the password change. That’s how whoever was making the telephone name received into the courtroom.”
