John McAfee, Co-Founder of McAfee Crypto Team and CEO of Luxcore and Founder of McAfee Antivirus, speaks at the Malta Blockchain Summit in St. Julian’s, Malta on November 1, 2018.
Darrin Zammit Lupi | Reuters
Eccentric antivirus software company founder John McAfee was found dead in his prison cell in Barcelona, Spain, on Wednesday, shortly after the Spanish national court approved his extradition to the United States to face criminal tax evasion charges Reuters and Associated Press.
According to the Catalan Ministry of Justice, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo initially reported that 75-year-old McAfee was dead.
El Mundo also reported, citing the Catalan Ministry of Justice, that the prison’s medical workers were trying to resuscitate him. McAfee was being held in Brian’s 2 prison in Catalonia.
McAfee was arrested at Barcelona International Airport last October on tax evasion allegations pending in federal court in Tennessee. Since then he has been in prison in Spain.
According to the indictment, McAfee earned millions in revenue from promoting cryptocurrencies, advising, lecturing, and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary film.
“From 2014 to 2018, McAfee allegedly did not file any tax returns, despite having received significant income from these sources,” the US Justice Department said in October.
McAfee was also charged in federal court in Tennessee in March for failing to report his cryptocurrency mining income.
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The Justice Department has said that McAfee and others involved in this so-called scalping program bought large amounts of cheap altcoins in cryptocurrency and then aggressively advertised them online with “false and misleading confirmation tweets” to artificially inflate their market prices.
“The members of the McAfee team have collectively made more than $ 2 million in illicit profits from their altcoin scalping activities,” the Justice Department said earlier this year.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed a civil lawsuit against McAfee of generating more than $ 23 million in undisclosed revenue from false and misleading cryptocurrency recommendations.
McAfee left the anti-virus software company of the same name that he founded in 1994.
In 2013, he created a mundane spoof video explaining how users can uninstall the software.
And in 2019, he was sentenced to pay $ 25 million in damages for the 2012 murder of a former neighbor in Belize.
This is the latest news. Check back for updates.
