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Elusive cybersecurity pioneer John McAfee was arrested in Spain for tax evasion in the United States, the Justice Department said in Washington.
McAfee is charged with failing to file U.S. tax returns from 2014 to 2018 and with concealing assets, including real estate, a vehicle and a yacht in the name of others, prosecutors said. An indictment filed in June was revealed Tuesday after he was taken into custody. He is being held pending extradition, the Justice Department said.
Prosecutors claim McAfee made millions of dollars through cryptocurrency promotion, talks, consulting jobs, and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary, but never filed tax returns. Instead, their income was deposited into accounts in the name of others, prosecutors say. He faces up to five years in prison if convicted of tax evasion and one year if convicted of not filing taxes.
It is the latest legal complication for the eccentric software mogul, who was interested in a murder in Belize, although he was not charged with any crime, and last year he was arrested in the Dominican Republic for entering the country with a cache of firearms. and ammunition. He was also briefly running for president in this year’s US election, ending his career from abroad in March.
The criminal charges were announced just hours after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued McAfee for promoting the sale of cryptocurrencies without revealing that he was being paid to do so.
The commission claims that McAfee recommended at least seven initial coin offerings to his Twitter followers from at least November 2017 to February 2018 without disclosing that he made more than $ 23 million to boost them. He is also accused of denying that he was being paid when investors asked him to.
The SEC seeks to compel McAfee to return all of its illicit earnings and to prohibit it from participating in the issuance, purchase or sale of digital asset securities and unspecified monetary penalties.
McAfee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The commission also accused McAfee of claiming to be an investor or technician tutor, “Creating the impression that you had examined these companies, that they were benefiting from their technical expertise and that you were willing to invest in the companies.”
When one blogger exposed that he was being paid, McAfee still had “virtually worthless” securities from the offerings he promoted and encouraged investors to buy, without revealing that they were his own securities and that he had paid a third party to recommend them. according to the complaint.
McAfee also participated in a practice called scalping, in which he accumulated large amounts of digital securities and promoted them on Twitter without revealing his intention to sell, the SEC said.
McAfee founded his eponymous software company in 1987. Intel Corp., seeking to incorporate security features directly into its chips, bought the company for $ 7.7 billion in 2010, and TPG and Thoma Bravo were later involved. In 2016, Intel announced that it had signed an agreement to transfer a 51% stake in the business to TPG for $ 1.1 billion. The company went public last month.
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