John McAfee, the controversial antivirus software magnate who recently ran afoul of the law, has died at 75. McAfee was in a Spanish prison awaiting extradition after being charged with tax evasion in the United States. The body of McAfee was found in his cell in a prison near Barcelona around 1 p.m. on Wednesday. The Catalonia court confirmed that an ET and a medical examiner are at the scene and investigators are looking into the death’s cause.
The Catalonia regional government’s Justice Department, which manages prisons in Catalonia, said medical staff and prison guards attempted to perform lifesaving procedures after locating McAfee but failed. In the statement, it stated ‘all signs point to a suicide’. A three-judge panel of Spain’s National Court ruled this week that McAfee could be extradited to the United States to face charges there. Court documents indicate that the decision could still have been appealed to a larger panel of judges at the same court.
McAfee was arrested in Spain in October after being indicted in the United States for tax evasion. According to court documents, he failed to file taxes for four years despite earning millions of dollars, promoting cryptocurrencies, consulting, speaking engagements, and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary. According to the indictment, he owed an unspecified amount of money. The Spanish judges endorsed his extradition to face charges for tax evasion for the years 2016, 2017, and 2018. McAfee argued earlier this month that the US tax evasion charges against him were politically motivated in a virtual hearing in the Spanish court, according to the Associated Press.
McAfee, the founder of the eponymous antivirus software firm with which he is no longer associated, was also indicted in March on separate charges of fraud and money laundering. In the last two decades of McAfee’s life, he encountered a series of strange events, including attempts to earn more than $13 million by marketing cryptocurrencies to unsuspecting investors.
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McAfee briefly fled from his home in Belize in 2012 after local police attempted to question him about the death of his neighbor. (He has denied any involvement in the death and has stated he fled for his life.) He lived in Guatemala and then in Montreal, where he worked on a documentary about his life. During his 2016 run for U.S. president, he launched a new security product he termed ‘a f—ing game changer’.
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