McAfee Corp. founder John McAfee has been found dead in his cell in Spain.
McAfee’s lawyer told Reuters that McAfee, 75, had died by suicide on Wednesday, after the Spanish High Court authorized his extradition to the United States.
The Guardian reported that Catalan regional police confirmed an El País report that the tech entrepreneur had been found dead in the Brians 2 prison in Barcelona, and that the Catalan justice department had issued a statement saying, “Judicial staff have been dispatched to the prison and are investigating the causes of death. Everything points to death by suicide.”
McAfee was arrested in Spain in October 2020 for tax evasion. The BBC reported then that McAfee had failed to file his tax returns for four years “despite earning millions from consulting work, speaking engagements, crypto-currencies and selling the rights to his life story.”
The Spain arrest was not McAfee’s first brush with the law. In March 2021, the US Department of Justice released a statement saying that McAfee and his cryptocurrency team’s executive advisor had been indicted for “conspiracy to commit commodities and securities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities and touting fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and substantive wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy offenses”.
In 2012, McAfee fled Belize when the police there carried out an investigation into the death of his neighbour. Belize authorities had named him as a “person of interest”. McAfee told ABC News in November 2012 that he was innocent and fearful of a “corrupt government". He was arrested in Guatemala in December 2012 after fleeing there. In 2019, a federal judge in Florida ordered him to pay $25 million over the neighbour’s death.
Outside of his brushes with the law and eccentricity, McAfee is perhaps best known for founding McAfee Corp, then McAfee Associates, Inc, in 1987. He resigned from the company in 1992, and it became Intel Security when it was bought by Intel in 2011. A deal with TPG in 2016 saw the company returning to its McAfee name. In 2017, McAfee and Intel settled lawsuits on the former’s right to use his name for other projects.
McAfee also notably ran for US president as a Libertarian in 2016.
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