A prison officer said that antivirus software pioneer John McAfee was found dead in his cell in Spain on Wednesday, shortly after the Spanish Court authorized his extradition to the United States where he was ‘WANTED’ for tax evasion.
A spokeswoman for the prison system in the north-eastern Catalonia region, while confirming the reports said, the 75-year-old entrepreneur was found dead in his cell in the Brains 2 penitentiary near Barcelona “apparently from suicide.”
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McAfee was arrested by the Spanish cops at the Barcelona airport in October 2020, just as he was about to board a flight to Istanbul.
He was arrested for introducing his eponymous program in the 1980s and in Tennessee he was indicted on tax evasion charges and in New York, he was charged with cryptocurrency fraud.
If convicted, he could have been faced with up to 30 years in prison. Earlier on the same day, Spanish National Court has approved his extradition to the United States. The decision would still have been appealed as the Spanish cabinet has yet not approved the extradition.
The US government has filed extradition in November 2020 and quoted in the ruling that McAfee has earned approximately 10 million Euros ($12 million) in past four years, but never filed a tax return.
It read, “To conceal his income and assets from the Internal Revenue Service... the defendant ordered part of his income to be paid to straw men and placed the property in their names.”
But the Spanish National Court has only referred to offenses that had taken place between 2016 and 2018.
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John McAfee has more than one million followers on Twitter. In a tweet on June 16, he said that the US authorities believed that he had “hidden crypto. I wish I had.”
He further said, “My remaining assets are all seized. My friends evaporated through fear of association. I have nothing. Yet, I regret nothing.”