US charges five in 'Scattered Spider' hacking scheme

Martin Estrada, the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, said the defendants conducted phishing attacks by sending bogus but real-looking mass text messages to employees' mobile phones warning that their accounts would be deactivated.

The hackers, in their teens or 20s at the time, allegedly directed employees to links for entering log-in information, enabling the hackers to steal from their employers and millions of dollars of cryptocurrency from individuals' accounts.