Antivirus father John McAfee arrested in Spain for fraud in the United States
John McAffe's run stopped last Saturday at Barcelona Airport, Spain, as he prepared to travel to Istanbul in Turkey.
REUTERS / Alexandre Meneghini
Text by: Patricia Lecompte
3 min
John McAffe, the founder of the antivirus software of the same name, was arrested by the Spanish police.
Prosecuted by American justice, the American billionaire with a sulphurous reputation risks several years in prison.
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John McAffe's run stopped last Saturday at Barcelona Airport, Spain, as he prepared to travel to Istanbul in Turkey.
He is the subject of an arrest warrant via Interpol, launched by the American justice which pursues him, among other things, for tax evasion and concealment of income.
American justice accuses the billionaire of having failed to declare several million dollars of income between 2014 and 2018, from the remuneration drawn from his conferences on cryptocurrencies, from his consulting services, from the fees collected for a documentary retracing his life.
According to the US tax authorities, these sums were declared under false identities.
Hide and seek with the tax authorities
To escape multiple accusations, in 2018 he fled the United States aboard his yacht, bought, it seems, again, thanks to a nominee.
He also allegedly used other names to invest in real estate and buy a luxury car.
For several years the billionaire has been playing hide and seek with the tax administration, he even bragged about it a year ago, when from Cuba he declared: “
I have not paid taxes for eight years.
I will not pay any more in the future - it is illegal and unconstitutional
”.
Provocative and eccentric, the American businessman is also in the sights of the SEC, the policeman of the American stock exchange, which accuses him of unfair advertising for cryptocurrencies.
The pioneer of antivirus software would have used its notoriety to promote certain digital currencies to its million Twitter subscribers.
He championed the fundraising of cryptocurrencies and the issuance of digital tokens exchangeable via the blockchain, but ignored his 30% commission received on each transaction.
According to the SEC, he would have received the equivalent of $ 23 million in cryptocurrency.
Before becoming the cryptocurrency guru, McAfee was a genius computer developer who built his fortune on his antivirus software.
Ten years ago he sold his McAfee company to the Intel group for seven billion 600 million dollars.
Then became the cryptocurrency evangelist, he claimed to earn two thousand dollars a day.
Currently in preventive detention near Barcelona, John McAffe will be extradited to his country, the United States, where he will have to answer charges of concealment of income, tax evasion, forgery and use of forgery before the American justice.
Aged 74, he faces 30 years in prison.
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