News4Jax reports:
A 20-year-old Palm Coast man linked to a massive cybercriminal gang pleaded guilty in a Jacksonville federal courtroom Friday morning to charges including conspiracy and wire fraud.
Noah Urban faced charges in two separate federal cases: charges in Florida that were unsealed in January 2024, and charges in southern California that were announced in November of last year. In the Florida case, Urban pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count each of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. In the California case, he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
In the Florida case, Urban was accused of stealing at least $800,000 in cryptocurrency from five different victims between August 2022 and March 2023. Prosecutors said Urban and others would steal victims’ personal information and arrange for the victims’ cell phone numbers to be swapped to phones that Urban and the other conspirators controlled. They would then use that to get control of the victims’ cryptocurrency accounts by resetting passwords and confirming via text message passwords. The tactic is known as “SIM swapping.”
Read more at News4Jax.
In related coverage, Hypefresh focus on his activities as a music leaker and the damage he did to that industry:
Urban’s activities shook the music industry. He was responsible for leaking a number of A-list tracks, including Playboi Carti’s “24 songs,” “Celine,” and “She Might,” as well as Ariana Grande and Lil Uzi Vert’s unreleased tracks. The leaking impacted well-laid plans to roll out albums and cost artists and their labels substantial sums of money. Ariana Grande expressed her frustration in September 2023, stating,
“this is so disheartening. i was going to refer back to this hook to utilize sometime. idk how people are continuing to do this but please please stop.”
The financial and emotional strain on artists has been a running narrative in the repercussions from Urban’s leaking.
Read more at Hypefresh.
Urban, who is believed to have been a member of Scattered Spider and was better known online as “King Bob” but who also used aliases of “Sosa,” “Elijah,” and “Gustavo Fring,” has agreed to pay approximately $13 million in restitution to victims in the Florida case and the California case. He also faces a long prison term that will have an add-on sentence for aggravated identity theft because sentencing for aggravated identity theft cannot be served concurrently with the sentence for other crimes and must be served as a two-year sentence after any other sentence is served.
Related: Urban’s Plea Agreement.
Related: Redacted indictment against Tyler Robert Buchanan in California case