John McAfee's Death - Who was he and what happened?

John McAfee was a US American entrepreneur in the IT branch where he developed some revolutionary antivirus and computer security programs to protect users from hacking attacks and inserted computer viruses that would damage the computer’s software. After a series of different scandals, John McAfee was found dead in a prison cell at the prison of Barcelona, Spain. Who was John McAfee - a short biography John David McAfee was born in 1945 at a US-American military base in Scotland. At the age of two, he grew up in the USA, because of his US-American roots. After ending his study at the Roanoke College in 1967 with a bachelor of mathematics degree he studied at the Virginia Tech college until 1970 and then worked at the silicon valley. During the years between 1970 and 1987, he worked for companies like General Electric, IBM or Siemens and traveled for his job to many countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Great Britain, Germany, India, and China (Hong Kong). While working at Lockheed Martin he founded the company “McAfee” that was specialized in developing antivirus programs for computer security. After an economical boost in 1992 where his company profits from a new, fast-spreading computer virus, called the Michelangelo virus because his software was able to protect against it. In 1994, the time where McAfee was forced together with another IT company called Network General, he left the company and sold all of his stocks of McAfee he owned, which brought him in ca. 100 million US dollars. Nevertheless, he lost a huge part of his money during the real estate crisis in 2007 which decimated his asset to 4 million dollars.

Why McAfee was wanted by the US Justice - jungle chase, tax fraud, and bitcoin scamming The life of John McAfee is interspersed with some scandals and allegations that he was a criminal, which, however, never been proven right. For example, in 2012 McAfee already lived in Belize in Central America, when a neighbor of his was murdered. After the police announced that they wanted to query McAfee about his dead neighbor, he successfully prevented this interview by escaping through the jungle of Belize. Also, the US Department of Justice wanted him because he allegedly committed some tax frauds in the US which could end with 30 years imprisonment. To avoid this he flew to Spain where he hoped to be safe. A few months ago, in March 2021, a new scandal took place in the life of John McAfee. Already in 2018 McAfee has predicted that the worth per Bitcoin will increase and be on a very high level in 2020 and 2021. McAfee and his business partner James Gale Watson used McAfee's Twitter account to spread information about Bitcoin and predicted a strong value increase. The Department of Justice designated this as a try to scam people with the illegal “pump and dump” method. McAfee and the Bitcoins - how the “pump and dump method” works The illegal “pump and dump” method means that a group of people buys cheap stocks at a low price, for example, bitcoin. This point purchase of shares causes an exponential increase of the shares' worth at the stock exchange market. Important to know is that the shares’ price only increases because a lot of people bought it, not because there is any real value behind the share and that is the trick. Now the group spreads information about the shares they bought to make it appear that it would be a good deal to join the group (“pumping” the stock). Some new people are now buying the shares at a very high price because they hope the price will increase even more so that they can sell the stocks later on and make a profit. After enough people buy the shares, the “pumping group” from the beginning sells all of their stocks, to a price that is higher than their previous investment (“dumping” - throwing away the shares). Now the stock price falls very fast and the latest stock investors are losing their money. McAfee found dead in his prison cell - what happened in Spain? The US Department of Justice asked every country to arrest and extradite McAfee if he crosses the borders and enters the country because they are aiming for a criminal proceeding for tax fraud in the USA. Some days later McAfee traveled to Spain and directly was arrested at the international airport of Barcelona. Just some hours after Spain's Department of Justice decided to agree with the request of the US Americans, John McAfee was found dead on a Wednesday afternoon in his prison cell. The official president of the prison stated his death as suicide. His lawyer said in an official statement that McAfee indicated that he won’t endure the arrest even longer and also planned to extradite to the USA and the probable arrest for 30 years was a big hit for McAfee. Similar to the case of Epstein, it's not completely clear yet whether it was suicide or not and the investigations are still ongoing.

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