A 20-year-old hacker from Palm Coast, Noah Michael Urban, known by aliases including "King Bob" and "Gustavo Fring," has been handed a 10-year federal prison sentence for his role in a sophisticated cyber fraud scheme. The sentence resulted from charges including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. The U.S. District Judge Harvey E. Schlesinger additionally ordered Urban to forfeit an estimated $4.8 million in assets and to pay $13 million in restitution to victims, as disclosed in an announcement on the U.S. Attorney’s Office website.
Urban's operation, running from August 2022 through March 2023, involved perpetrating "SIM swaps" to illegally gain personal identification information from at least 59 individuals. The conspiracy didn't just stop at stealing identities; Urban was able to meticulously hack into numerous cryptocurrency accounts and to swiftly transfer virtual currency into his control. This cyber-crime wave left a trail of excessive financial damage, with the total reported losses surpassing $13 million, as per U.S. Attorney's Office.
Not content with individual thefts, Urban had also worked with accomplices to target company employees nationwide, sending phishing text messages to harvest credentials. These stolen identifiers became the keys to unlock non-public company data and further infiltrate individual cryptocurrency wallets. Evidence of Urban's involvement was discovered by the FBI during a search of his residence, where investigators found connections between his computer and the compromised email and cryptocurrency accounts of the victims.
The complex nature of Urban's crimes, which had at one point allowed him to amass a small fortune in cryptocurrency, has been harshly disrupted by the FBI's intervention. The bureau's search yielded cryptocurrencies with an approximate value of $4.8 million, effectively stripping Urban of his ill-gotten gains. These investigative and prosecutorial efforts, as outlined on the Justice Department's press release, were coordinated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation along with Assistant United States Attorneys John Cannizzaro and Lauren Restrepo of the Middle District of Florida and the Central District of California, respectively.
