Kim Dotcom, the criminal face of 2010s cyber crime, will finally be extradited to the US

Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload and the strong face of cybercrime in the early 2010s, is finally heading to the US. Reuters reports that New Zealand’s justice minister signed an extradition order on Thursday to end the 13-year-old case of the businessman, paving the way for the German-born Dotcom to face charges in the US government.

“I carefully considered all the information, and decided that Mr. Dotcom should surrender to the US to face the case,” said Goldsmith’s statement. The ruling comes more than six years after a New Zealand court ruled that Dotcom could be extradited to the US, paving the way for an appeal that led to today’s ruling.

Once the 13th most visited site on the Internet, file hosting site Megaupload was a hotbed of pirated content. In early 2012, US authorities indicted Dotcom and six others on charges of fraud, copyright infringement, money laundering and copyright infringement. The US lawsuit alleges that Megaupload charged copyright owners $500 million in damages while making $175 million in paid advertising and subscriptions.

The raid on Dotcom’s Auckland mansion was the biggest surprise in 2012’s headlines. The New York Times he reported at the time that when he saw the police, Dotcom locked himself inside, opened several electronic locks and waited in a safe room. When the police went inside, they saw Dotcom standing next to “a gun that they said looked like a sawed-off gun.”

Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz) had a few brushes with the law before that. At least he said he spent three months in a Munich prison in 1994 for “hacking into Pentagon computers and viewing real-time satellite images of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.” Soon after, he received a two-year suspended sentence for a scam involving stolen phone card numbers.

In 2001, he was indicted in the largest insider trading case in German history. He reportedly fled Germany to escape those charges, was captured in Thailand, extradited (this week is not his first) and convicted in 2002. After that, he moved to New Zealand, living in a luxurious house. .

You can see that mansion — and the taste of his larger-than-life persona — in his music video for “Good Life.”

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed the extradition order on Thursday and followed normal practice in giving Dotcom “a short period of time to think and get advice” on his decision.

Dotcom, never one to mince words, sent a message to X that “the US listening colony in the South Pacific has just decided to kick me out for what users have uploaded to Megaupload.”