Antivirus software tycoon John McAfee died by an apparent suicide in a Spanish jail cell Wednesday evening — hours after reports surfaced that he would be extradited to face federal charges in the US, according to local media.
The eccentric tech entrepreneur was arrested in October and was awaiting extradition when he was found dead, police sources told the newspaper El Pais.
The newspaper reported McAfee was pulled from his cell in Barcelona and police are investigating the circumstances around his death.
“Everything points to suicide,” the newspaper reported, citing justice department officials in the country. A second Spanish newspaper, El Mundo, also reported McAfee had died by an apparent suicide in the jail.
Earlier on Wednesday, the Spanish High Court had agreed to extradite McAfee, who has been charged with a number of federal financial crimes in two districts in the United States.
McAfee was hit with a 10-count indictment in the Western District of Tennessee in October for allegedly evading taxes on millions of dollars in income.
He was arrested by authorities in Spain after the indictment was handed down and has been in custody in the country since.
In the Tennessee case, prosecutors alleged McAfee racked up millions of dollars in income through speaking engagements, selling his personal story for a documentary and doing consulting work.
He then skipped paying taxes on all of the income from 2014 to 2018, according to the feds.
He was also charged in a separate indictment in Manhattan federal court in March for a pump and dump scheme involving cryptocurrencies that he was touting on social media.
In that case, McAfee and an accomplice allegedly bilked bitcoin investors out of some $13 million in two schemes, including one where they bought up large quantities of “alt-coin” then inflated the price of it by publicizing it on Twitter.
They then sold off the cryptocurrency at the inflated price and made a $2 million profit, prosecutors said.
McAfee had claimed at an extradition hearing earlier this month that the federal tax evasion charges against him were politically motivated, Reuters reported.
source: New York Post
