Hacker Who Breached SEC X Account Agrees to Pay $50,000 Fine in Plea Agreement

Eric Council Jr., the individual charged with aiding the breach of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s X account, has entered a guilty plea.

Consequently, Council faces a possible fine of $50,000 as part of the plea agreement, according to Bloomberg.

U.S. authorities submitted a forfeiture proposal for the $50,000 in a filing with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on February 9. This fine pertains to what prosecutors claim is the sum that Council “personally acquired” during the manipulated post on X, previously known as Twitter, which falsely claimed that the SEC had approved the first Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds in the United States.

The price of Bitcoin surged dramatically before crashing down after the agency confirmed that its X account had been compromised.

As reported by crypto.news at the time, the FBI took Council into custody in October 2024. Subsequently, in the same month, it was revealed that federal prosecutors were weighing a plea deal.

On Monday, February 10, 2025, Eric Council Jr. pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated identity theft and device fraud. Judge Amy Berman Jackson scheduled the sentencing for May 16, 2025.

Interestingly, the SEC approved the spot ETFs just a day after the breach, with BlackRock’s IBIT ETF leading the charge in terms of inflows as buying momentum increased. Throughout the year, inflows exceeded $40 billion, closing 2024 with over $120 billion in net assets within the U.S. spot ETFs market.

In other developments at the SEC, the agency also approved spot Ethereum (ETH) ETFs in the United States. The election of Donald Trump has coincided with a series of resignations and departures from the agency, most notably former chair Gary Gensler.

In the meantime, there has been an abundance of activity concerning new ETF applications within the industry, including those for Litecoin, XRP, Solana, and Dogecoin.