John McAfee - US Tech Legend And Millionaire, Arrested In Spain For Tax Evasion

On Monday, the U.S. Justice Department said John David McAfee was arrested in Spain for charges on tax evasion. In 2012, McAfee – a pioneer in antivirus software fled Belize to avoid a murder investigation.

John David McAfee is a tech legend who becomes a millionaire from the anti-virus software named after him. In 2012, when Belize police sought McAfee for questioning about his neighbor’s death, he left the country.

He was seen in Guatemala City a few weeks after the incident and then disappeared for years until he resurfaced to run for president of the U.S as a Libertarian candidate.

According to the Justice Department, the process to bring Mr. McAfee back to the U.S is still pending. There is no fixed timeline for the extradition for now.

According to an indictment the Justice Department made public on Monday, Mr. McAfee is accused of failing to file tax returns from for four years, from 2014 to 2018 while he earned millions from selling his life story, consulting work, speaking engagements, and promoting cryptocurrencies.

The indictment also said he used back accounts others set up to receive payments, thus avoiding his tax liability. Other tricks he has used to avoid the Internal Revenue Service including buying assets and dealing in cryptocurrency in other people’s names.

Each time a person fails to file tax returns, he or she will face a year prison sentence while tax evasion equals five years in prison for each count.

John David McAfee is also involved in another charge. According to a complaint of the Securities and Exchange Commission, he made over $23 million in 2017 and 2018 through many initial coin offerings – a form of crowdfunding. He recommended it to his large number of followers on Twitter, disgusting them as impartial investment advice without telling them that he gained a lot by doing so.

The complaint reveals that Mr. McAfee was paid half in Ether, the Etherreum network’s currency, the other half was paid in Bitcoin, by the firms selling the securities.

McAfee, the company named after him, used to be a household name in the security software industry. In 2010, Intel acquired it for $7.7 billion and TPG, an investment company, bought its majority stake six years later.

Mr. McAfee’s association with the company ended a long time ago and the indictment doesn’t mention any relationship between him and the company.

In 2012, McAfee made headlines for his connection with the death of his neighbor in Belize - Gregory Faull.

After the police said he was a person of interest in the case, he disappeared but kept on tweeting and blogging. McAfee said he ran because he feared for his own life and insulted both the Belize police and government.

Mr. McAfee sought asylum in Guatemala City and his lawyer said the persecution targeting him was because he refused to provide Belize authorities with money. Dean Barrow, Belize’s prime minister called him bonkers.

Days later, the photographer and reporter interviewed him in his hiding place in Guatemala City leaked his whereabouts, leading to his arrest on immigration charges.

Little is known about him until he ran for president as a Libertarian in 2016. In a campaign video, he said he and other Libertarian candidates stood no chance of being the next president.

In 2019, McAfee was ordered to pay $25 million by a Florida court for a lawsuit about the death of Mr. Faull. He took to Twitter to claim that he wouldn’t pay the sum, calling the court’s order an extortion game targeting the wealthy Americans. He also said he had never been a suspect for murder anywhere.

In the same year, a report from Reuters revealed that he came to Britain after he and his wife were held in custody for entering and bringing firearms to the Dominican Republic.

Candido Simon, his lawyer in the country, told the news agency that when a Dominican Republic’s attorney general asked where he wanted to go, his answer was London.

His Twitter account, with more than one million followers, displays “wherever I am” as McAfee’s location. And the complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission said his whereabouts is unknown.

Last month, when sharing his thought on the U.S presidential election, he wrote that he would vote for no one as slave masters were all the same and people are just numbers.

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