Elon Musk’s teen protege, known online as “Big Balls,” provided tech support to a criminal gang that cyberstalked an FBI agent two years before working at the Department of Government Efficiency, a new report alleges.
Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old Northeastern University drop-out, is part of a group of young DOGE engineers who have been given access to critical computer systems as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the federal government.
According to corporate records reviewed by Reuters, in June 2022, while still in high school, Coristine founded the network services company DiamondCDN. Per the report published Wednesday, its services were used by a ring of cybercriminals operating under the name “EGodly” between October 2022 and June 2023.
Users attempting to access the EGodly website would allegedly hit a DiamondCDN “security check.”
The group is believed to have boasted that it hijacked phone numbers and law enforcement emails across Latin America and Eastern Europe, in addition to committing cryptocurrency theft.
In early 2023, the group distributed the personal details of an FBI agent—including his phone number and photographs of his residence in Wilmington, Delaware—on the secure messaging app Telegram after the group claimed he was investigating them.
The cybergang posted audio of a prank call made to the agent’s phone along with a drive-by video harassing him outside his house, according to the report.
“EGodly says you're a b****!” one person screamed.
The agent, who is now retired, told Reuters the group attracted law enforcement attention due to a practice known as “swatting,” which involves making hoax emergency calls to send SWAT teams to a targeted address.
Former deputy director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Nitin Natarajan shared his concern that Coristine provided services to the criminal group just two years before joining DOGE.
“This stuff was not in the distant past, the recency of the activity and the types of groups he was associated would definitely be concerning,” he said.
After dropping out of college, Coristine briefly worked in Silicon Valley, but he was fired from a cybersecurity internship last year for allegedly leaking insider information to a rival company. He was also accused of frequenting Telegram and Discord communities that are linked to cybercrime.
He now finds himself serving under the world’s richest man as a “senior adviser” to the State Department and Department of Homeland Security, with access to highly sensitive information about working American diplomats and those involved in national security and counterterrorism operations.
Coristine still describes himself on his LinkedIn profile as a “Volunteer (Intern) Plumber” with the U.S. government. His profile also says that he worked a four-month internship at Musk’s neurotechnology company, Neurolink.
Coristine is also the grandson of KGB officer-turned-FBI informant Valery Fedorovich Martynov, who was executed in the Soviet Union as a double agent in 1987, according to freelance journalist Jacob Silverman.
Alarm bells rang after reports first surfaced about Coristine’s access to sensitive government material.
“Who the hell voted for – excuse the phrase – a guy who calls himself ‘Big Balls,’” Democratic strategist Paul Begala CNN’s The Source earlier this month.
“A 19-year-old kid going in there and trying to fire cancer researchers and scientists and teachers and agricultural specialists? It’s appalling.”
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