One of the US so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) service’s best-known employees, 19-year-old Edward Coristine, has resigned from the US government, a White House official said on Tuesday, a month after the acrimonious departure of his former bossElon Musk.
The White House official gave no further details on the move and Coristine did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
Coristine worked at Musk’s brain connectivity company Neuralink before joining the tech billionaire as he led Doge established by theTrump administrationearlier this year. Doge has overseen job cuts at almost every federal agency but is starting to see losses itself. Key Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, who was in charge of day-to-day running of Doge, has also left, along with others.
The White House has said that Doge’s mission will continue.
Coristine’s youth and online moniker “Big Balls” became a pop-culture meme as Doge swept through the US government, seizing data and firing employees en masse.
Last month, Reuters reported that Coristine was one of two Doge associates promoting the use of AI across the federal bureaucracy. Media outlets, including Wired which first reported his departure, revealed that Coristine had been active in a chat room popular with hackers and previously had been fired from a job following an alleged data leak.
In March, Reuters reported that Coristine had provided tech support to a cybercrime gang that had bragged about trafficking in stolen data and harassing an FBI agent.
Beginning around 2022, while still in high school, Coristine ran a company called DiamondCDN that provided network services, according to corporate and digital records reviewed by Reuters and interviews with half a dozen former associates.
Among its users was a website run by a ring of cybercriminals operating under the name “EGodly”, according to digital records preserved by the internet intelligence firm DomainTools and the online cybersecurity tool Any.Run.
The digital records reviewed by Reuters showed the EGodly website, dataleak.fun, was tied to internet protocol addresses registered to DiamondCDN and other Coristine-owned entities between October 2022 and June 2023, and that some users attempting to access the site around that time would hit a DiamondCDN “security check”.
In 2023, EGodly boasted on its Telegram channel of hijacking phone numbers, breaking into unspecified law enforcement email accounts in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and cryptocurrency theft.
Early that year, the group distributed the personal details of anFBIagent who they said was investigating them, circulating his phone number, photographs of his house, and other private details on Telegram.
EGodly also posted an audio recording of an obscene prank call made to the agent’s phone and a video, shot from the inside of a car, of an unknown party driving by the agent’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, at night and screaming out the window: “EGodly says you’re a bitch!“
Reuters could not independently verify EGodly’s boasts of cybercriminal activity, including its claims to have hijacked phone numbers or infiltrated law enforcement emails. But it was able to authenticate the video by visiting the same Wilmington address and comparing the building to the one in the footage.
The FBI agent targeted by EGodly, who is now retired, told Reuters that the group had drawn law enforcement attention because of its connection to swatting, the dangerous practice of making hoax emergency calls to send armed officers swarming targeted addresses. The agent didn’t go into detail. Reuters is not identifying him out of concern for further harassment.
“These are bad folks,” the former agent said. “They’re not a pleasant group.”