EVERY PARENT’S NIGHTMARE

He was a quiet expat kid whose mother moved him to Spain to avoid his abusive father and violent bullying at school… but when he became withdrawn and locked himself in his room, she had no idea he would become a globally infamous hacker. Walter Finch unravels the tragic, complicated story

SANDRA O’Connor, 58, had watched her son, Joseph grow more and more withdrawn and isolated in his bedroom with his computer.

But the English criminal lawyer at least thought he was ‘safe in his room’, away from the normal dangers that teenagers face on the Costa del Sol. So when an army of riot police kicked down their front door in Estepona, she could have had no idea that he was one of the world’s most wanted cyber hackers.

Sought by the US authorities for a string of serious cyber crimes committed when just 19 years old - including hacking into the private Twitter accounts of President Biden and Elon Musk - he was also a serious fraudster who stole $794,000 from a Manhattan cryptocurrency firm. And perhaps most disappointingly for his mother, he also stole naked photos of young women and then tried to extort them.

Now, Joseph, 24, also known as PlugWalkJoe, has just been handed a five year stretch in one of New York’s toughest prisons.

But it could have been a lot worse… and if it wasn’t for a series of moving pleas from his mother and wider family he could have faced 70 years in jail, the Olive Press can reveal.

In a series of remarkably emotional letters addressed to Judge Rakoff at the famous Southern District of New York, they helped to explain how a kind-hearted expat who struggled to understand normal social interactions became the world’s online public enemy number one.

Unearthed via requests to the US court service, they paint a tragic picture of violence, neglect and isolation that saw the bright youngster failing to receive the guidance and support he was obviously in need of.

Born to a violent and absent father, it emerges Joseph was raised by a single mother who was also traumatised by the same man.

His teenage years in Liverpool were fraught, as he suffered from bullying by other kids that he could not understand.

Sandra confessed that she had not been ‘emotionally available and nurturing’ to her youngest child (with his other two brothers born to different fathers). She described herself as ‘effectively broken’ by the violence she had suffered at the hands of Joseph’s father, who had not wanted the child and at one time inflicted such a severe beating on her she required 17 stitches to her head.

“I just went to work on autopilot,” she recalled.

“But it's the children who suffer the most as those crucial early years of loving nurturing are absent and damage results.”

Unwelcome efforts by Joseph’s father to come back into his life in secondary school reopened unhealed wounds.

“Joseph was always saying how sad it was that his father had ruined my life, and that it would have been better if he had not been born,” Sandra told the judge in one heartbreaking missive.

“I reassured him that he was worth it, and I would not change the situation if it meant he was not born.

“He told me I was rubbish at choosing men,” she continued, “and that he hoped one day I met someone who was kind and would treat me well.”

Sandra’s father, who had been an excellent father figure for Joseph’s two older brothers, died unexpectedly while she was pregnant with him.

“Not a day goes by that I do not think about him and miss him and feel saddened that Joseph never got to receive the love and care his grandfather provided to his siblings.”

Sandra would constantly tell Joseph of his grandfather, and in turn Joseph would speak about him as if he had known him himself.

“He would tell me lovely things about his deceased grandfather,” his grandmother Agnes reminisced in another letter.

“When you're bereaved, it is very comforting. It was as if he knew I almost needed this to help me cope.

“He would tell stories with so much love and add funny anecdotes about what his grandfather would say if he were here.

“He was such a sweet, funny boy and so kind to others,” she added.

As his mother explained: “When younger, he would try to encourage me to meet someone who could be his dad, which is so sad.

“He saw his young friends with their loving families and he effectively only had me.”

Having moved Joseph back to Estepona at the age of 17, Sandra watched him retreat from the perplexing world that had treated him so cruelly into an online one.

One where his anxieties and peculiarities vanished and he made friends and found respect.

But so obsessed did he become with his gaming and his computers that in turn he became oblivious to the real world around him.

Conversations and constant nagging had little effect as he withdrew almost entirely to his room, even refusing to eat meals with his mother and instead ‘eating himself fat’ and snacking on processed foods.

SNARED: Estepona police picked up Joseph while mum Sandy (inset) was at home downstairs path that would finally find him languishing in a New York jail, struggling to understand how his life had gone so wrong.

In another sad knock-on effect, the enormous costs of the proceedings have depleted Sandra’s financial resources and imperilled her retirement.

“There will be no inheritance for Joseph and his brothers,” she wrote, adding her own inheritance from her father is gone, and Agnes only has enough to pay for her own funeral.

Joseph has so far been spared this tragic full understanding of the long-term impact his deeds will have on his family.

His cousin, Niamh, 23, told of an anecdote during one visit to Joseph in prison that summed up the difficulty he has dealing with life.

“He told Sandra his mum, she looked pretty,” she wrote. “She thanked him. Then he said, ‘well you are, even with your wrinkles and you being old, you should try and get Botox before you start looking as wrinkly as nan.’” They all burst out laughing.

“He was just being how we all know him to be, honest without realising that it can be too much to hear sometimes,” Niamh went on.

The people he was chatting with were not gamers but, in fact, hackers

When she flew to Liverpool for work trips, the lawyer would have to leave pre-prepared foods and snacks that just needed heating in the microwave. And upon her return, she would be faced with a chaotic pigsty of dirty dishes and cups piling up, which he noticed not one iota.

When Covid struck, Sandra found herself stuck in England and unable to get back to look after Joseph. Instead she hired a housekeeper. It was during this period Joseph finally managed to find friendship, albeit with a community online. Sandra would get back to hear him laughing loudly with his online friends - ‘something he rarely did.’

“For me, this was comforting and a good sign,” she wrote.

It was preferable he was laughing in his bedroom rather than exposed to ‘a world on the outside where he was ill-equipped to navigate.’

“I believed he was safe from this world, where he was not in touch with any dangers [such as] alcohol, drugs, bullying and the worst aspects of society,” Sandra told the judge. But she had no idea the people he was chatting with were not gamers but, in fact, hackers. And it would be they who led Joseph down the

“He had no idea why we were laughing and there is little point in explaining it to him.”

For his mother’s birthday in June, Joseph arranged through a friend to send her a personalised card with a huge beautiful bouquet of flowers, a gift-wrapped perfume, and a box of gold decorated cupcakes with messages on the cakes.

Attached was a personalised card.

Inside, it read: "Happy birthday to the one who has loved, cared, helped, worried and been there for me through it all.

“Thank you for always being there for me, you're a great mother and I love you a lot.

“You are the smartest woman I know and will ever know and very kind and beautiful.

“Everyone who meets you, or their families, always say you are their favourite person and extremely rare and for that I am very proud of you and not have a bad word to say about you.”

Having spent two and a half years in jail waiting to be sentenced, Joseph is already half way through his five year sentence.

Awaiting him when he gets out is a job offer: A UK-based energy firm is willing to take him on as a Web Developer Apprentice.

For his part, Joseph told the judge: “I want to lead a productive life. I now look back at what an empty life I led. A solitary life alone with gaming and online friends in an unreal, unhealthy world, the only life that mattered. “I neglected my family, my future, I was without plans or any aims in life.”