Kim Dotcom

Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz in 1974) is a German-Finnish internet entrepreneur and political activist who lives in New Zealand. He is best known as the founder and former chief executive of the file-hosting service Megaupload, which operated from 2005 to 2012 until United States authorities seized its website and brought charges including criminal copyright infringement and money laundering. He was arrested in New Zealand in 2012 and has contested extradition to the United States through the courts for more than a decade, denying wrongdoing. In 2013 he launched a later cloud storage service, Mega, though he cut his ties with it in 2015. His earlier record in Germany includes convictions for computer fraud and data espionage in the 1990s.