Cybersecurity company founder, John McAfee has been arrested in Spain after allegedly evading taxes.
The US Justice Department revealed that an indictment from 15 June delivered by the Tax Division claims McAfee failed to file tax returns from 2014 to 2018 despite earning “millions in income from promoting cryptocurrencies, consulting work, speaking engagements, and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary”.
The cybersecurity pioneer is reportedly also facing charges of cryptocurrency promotion from the SEC. According to Engadget, “the SEC explains that the charges are for McAfee promotion initial coin offerings (ICOs) via Twitter without admitting that he was getting paid as much as $23 million for it”.
“It details the alleged scheme, as McAfee publicly promoted coin offerings for years while claiming he wasn’t being paid until admitting in 2018 that he’d received compensation.”
Bloomberg indicates that this is not the first time McAfee has been implicated in legal battles. He was “a person of interest in a murder in Belize, though not charged with a crime, and [in 2019] he was detained in the Dominican Republic for entering the country with a cache of firearms and ammunition. He was also briefly a candidate for president in this year’s U.S. election, ending his run from abroad in March.”
