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 in the present day, 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 at least $800,000 from 5 victims by way of SIM-swapping attacks that diverted their cell phone calls and textual content messages to units 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 reports the federal choose within the case in the present day 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 considered one of 5 members of Scattered Spider (a.ok.a. “Oktapus,” “Scatter Swine” and “UNC3944”), which specialised in SMS and voice phishing assaults that tricked workers at sufferer corporations into getting 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 several months during the summer 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 had 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 info, and that members additionally phished individuals to steal hundreds of thousands of {dollars} price 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 continually bragged on the Com about stealing unreleased rap music recordings from standard artists, presumably by way of SIM-swapping assaults. Lots of these purloined tracks or “grails” he later offered or gave away on boards.
Noah “King Bob” City, posting to Twitter/X across the time of his sentencing in the present day.
Sosa additionally was energetic in a very damaging group of achieved legal SIM-swappers often called “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 units they managed by continually phishing workers of the most important cellular suppliers. In February 2023, KrebsOnSecurity printed information taken from the Telegram channels for Star Fraud and two different SIM-swapping teams exhibiting these crooks centered on SIM-swapping T-Cell clients, and that they collectively claimed internal access to T-Mobile on 100 separate occasions over a 7-month period in 2022.
Reached by way of considered 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 actual 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 court transcript (PDF) from a standing listening to in February 2025 exhibits City was telling the reality in regards to 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 each 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 become 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 individual referred to as the surface contractor representing Choose Toomey saying, ‘I would like a password change.’ And so they gave out the password change. That’s how whoever was making the telephone name bought into the courtroom.”
