John McAfee, the man and face behind the self-titled cybersecurity brand and antivirus software, is dead. Reports from multiple sources say that McAfee was found dead in his prison cell in Barcelona, Spain, where he was being held pending extradition back to the US.
Javier Villalba, McAfee’s lawyer, confirmed that McAfee’s death was suicide and that the man had hung himself inside his cell. At the time of his death, McAfee had already been held by Spanish authorities for nine months. He was 75 years old.
Villalba says that McAfee’s suicide was clearly the result of a “cruel system that had no reason to keep a man in jail for so long”. Arrested back in October 2020, McAfee was facing charges of tax evasion in the US, as well as a securities fraud charge in relation to a cryptocurrency pump-and-dump scheme, to which he defiantly denied as recently as June this year.
The US believes I have hidden crypto. I wish I did but it has dissolved through the many hands of Team McAfee (your belief is not required), and my remaining assets are all seized. My friends evaporated through fear of association.
I have nothing.
Yet, I regret nothing.
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) June 16, 2021
McAfee alluded that the extradition was like a death sentence and that should he be extradited to the US and convicted, he would spend the rest of his life in jail and be used “as an example” by the US justice system.
McAfee has long been a controversial figure for the majority of his life. After selling his company to Intel back in 2011, the man joined several companies and, for a period in time, resided in Belize until 2013, when he fled the Caribbean nation after he was considered a person of interest in the murder of another US citizen. On top of that, McAfee also claimed that he had been on the run from the CIA, and even threw in his lot for the US Presidency, back in 2016 and 2020.
(Source: Reuters, The Verge, The Guardian // Image: Reuters)
