Despite the payment and deletion, some AT&T customers and those who communicated with them are still at risk, as others may have samples of the data that were not deleted.
The hacker who spoke to WIRED received payment from AT&T instead of Binns because, he says, in a strange twist of the case, Binns was arrested in Turkey in May for an unrelated breach dating back to 2021. That breach involved a massive theft of data from T-Mobile. AT&T said in its SEC filing that it believed “at least one individual” involved in the breach had already been arrested, but did not identify him. 404 Media was first to report on Friday that Binns is reportedly that person.
Binns was indicted in 2022 on 12 counts related to the 2021 hack of T-Mobile “and theft and sale of sensitive files and information” involving data on more than 40 million people. However, Binns had moved from the U.S. to Turkey with his Turkish mother in 2018, according to an interview he gave to The Wall Street Journal three years ago. The indictment remained sealed until this year. Last September, the U.S. learned he could be arrested in Turkey and extradited to the U.S. because he is not a Turkish citizen. Prosecutors in Seattle, near where T-Mobile is based, asked a U.S. court in December to unseal parts of the indictment so they could issue them and an arrest warrant to Turkish authorities, who will make the final decision on whether Binns could be legally extradited under Turkish law. The court granted the unsealing request in January.
The hacker who received the payment from AT&T tells WIRED that he believes Binns was arrested in Turkey around May 5, as Binns has not responded to attempts by him and others to contact him. WIRED reached out to the Seattle public defender who is representing Binns in the T-Mobile case but did not receive a response.
Binns has repeatedly come into contact with U.S. authorities, accusing the CIA and other agencies of wild conspiracies to harm and entrap him. As part of a 2020 FOIA lawsuit against the FBI, CIA, and U.S. Special Operations Command to obtain documents he said he had on him, Binns alleged that CIA contractors spied on him, performed experiments on him, harassed him, and that one of them pointed a “psychotronic weapon” at his head and used a microwave to shock him, among other allegations. He later filed a motion to dismiss his FOIA case, claiming that he submitted some of the documents while he was “experiencing a psychological episode induced by intoxication.”
Last October, Binns wrote to the U.S. District Court in Seattle in the T-Mobile case saying he believed his actions were influenced by a chip implanted in his brain when he was a baby. In a certified letter sent to the court and viewed by WIRED, Binns told the judge he believed a “wireless brain stimulation implant (basal ganglia) or device implanted shortly after birth” was responsible for “unpredictable behavior, including irresistible impulses, factitious neurological problems, and the potential commission of crimes.”
The timeline shows that if Binns is responsible for the AT&T breach, he did so when he likely already knew he was being sued for the T-Mobile hack and could be arrested for it.