U.S. Army Soldier Sentenced to Nearly 6 Years for Hacking AT&T, Verizon in Extortion Scheme
A federal court in Seattle sentenced Cameron John Wagenius, a 22-year-old U.S. Army soldier who had been stationed in South Korea, to 70 months in prison for a scheme in which he broke into telecommunications companies’ cloud storage accounts and stole customer call and text metadata, then attempted to extort the victim firms. Wagenius, who used the online alias “Kiberphant0m,” is accused of exploiting exposed or weakly secured Snowflake cloud accounts to access systems at AT&T, Verizon, and other telecom providers, pulling records that included source and destination phone numbers, timestamps, and call durations.
Prosecutors said the intrusions affected the call and text metadata of more than 100 million AT&T customers alone, with additional victims at Verizon and other carriers. Wagenius publicly threatened to release the stolen data unless the companies paid him, a tactic consistent with the broader wave of extortion attempts that followed large-scale breaches of Snowflake-hosted customer data across multiple companies in 2024 and 2025. He also claimed, though this has not been independently verified, to have obtained call logs belonging to then-President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, as well as schematics related to the National Security Agency.
The September 25 sentencing, handed down alongside an order to pay $294,978 in restitution to victims, capped a case that also surfaced unusual misconduct while Wagenius awaited trial. According to court records, he violated Bureau of Prisons computer-use policies by logging into other inmates’ email accounts to submit queries to AI chatbots, asking them to supply CVE details and “real world working scripts” for exploits, along with information on building makeshift antennas and other topics relevant to a potential escape. The episode has drawn attention from security researchers as an early example of incarcerated individuals attempting to misuse consumer AI tools for illicit technical research.