McAfee Arrested in Spain, DOJ Indictment for Tax Evasion Using Cryptocurrencies | Hacker News Reader

McAfee Arrested in Spain, DOJ Indictment for Tax Evasion Using Cryptocurrencies

justice.gov

208 pointsIfOnlyYouKnew82 comments

McAfee, the marketing nightmare that just keeps on giving. I genuinely don't understand why McAfee the company hasn't changed its name yet.

In the meantime, some greatest hits:

How to Uninstall McAfee (NSFW-ish) https://youtu.be/bKgf5PaBzyg

The McAfee guide to bribery in the third world http://www.whoismcafee.com/the-travel-guide/

McAfee, like Symantec, has a Compliance driven sales cycle. No one likes the software, few think it's useful, but businesses must buy it due to their regulatory burdens.

The name doesn't matter. The marketing doesn't matter. The features don't matter. The performance doesn't matter. Laws and Industry Groups matter.

That's true. Compliance - we went with clamav for what we do - it was easy to set up on cloud.

Perhaps there is a market for antivirus software that literally does nothing.

- Enterprise ready - runs on premise

- Vastly faster than the competition

- Huge profit margins due to minimized developer costs

A bit like http://vanilla-js.com the Javascript framework of 0 bytes (25 bytes compressed), but that antivirus would have the upside of having exactly 0 added risk, which distinguishes it from the rest of its industry.

Compliance to what? I’m genuinely curious about who would mandate antivirus.

Any regulated industry where money or lives are at stake. An example is finance where regulations specifically state that you must have antivirus installed, even on servers.

what class software as antivirus for the legislator?

Doesn't Defender qualify as satisfying the regulatory burden?

Even for smaller companies, when doing financial audit (required by law in many places) - consultant firms do highly encourage use of “endpoint protection across organization”. So in case of some IT screwup and financial losses, the auditors can say- “Well, they had Industry standard antivirus, so this shouldn’t have happened. Our financial risk assesment was still correct.”

ISO 27001 specifically mentions it

PCI-DSS pretty much requires a malware protection solution. In practice - an antivirus.

Why Not Windows Defender? It’s really quite competent and it’s pretty lightweight.

That is just fine for PCI-DSS. Not a problem at all.

For a short period they actually looked like they were rebranding as Intel security. All their material stopped actually saying "McAfee". Intel selling them off again put a stop to that.

The other branding issue is no-one seems capable of spelling McAfee. In the last thread on John, multiple people referred to "mcaffee", something I regularly see from their own sales people.

The "How to Uninstall McAfee" video is amazing; it is also pretty NSFW for anyone considering clicking on it at work.

Apparently the woman giving him a lap dance/walking away with him in the end is his wife.

For context, he was vocal about not filing taxes and basically taunted the IRS to go after him: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-shill-john-mcafee-have...

Sounds very on brand

Taunting the Happy Fun Ball never ends well.

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmqeZl8OI2M

Not according to Mrs McAfee on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theemrsmcafee/status/1313238348438401024

This would be much more convincing if the photo was timestamped (eg. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AuthenticationBy...)

Today's announcement was merely that he was indicted back in June and the indictment is now unsealed.

He was arrested in June and presumably may be out on bail in Spain while the extradition hearing proceeds.

As far as unsealed indictments go, this one isn’t very entertaining. Barely longer than the press release. There’s gotta be more pages to be released.

"Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee" is an eye opening view into his world and the history of the McAfee corporation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gringo:_The_Dangerous_Life_of_...

Heard many of the accusations made in this film are fabricated. For example, I heard that the film makers paid some of the women in the film to say stuff that MacAfee never engaged in. So I would watch this documentary with a skeptical mind but it is an entertaining documentary none the less, just don't take it 100% serious.

Was the part where they said he probably paid to have his neighbor murdered true? Because that was not a very good look for him.

This reminds me of the amazing sentence:

>John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder.

https://breakermag.com/trapped-at-sea-with-cryptos-nouveau-r...

great line; whole piece was pretty good too; good enough for me to keep reading after ctrl-f for the line haha

Can you please provide a citation?

Yes. I am so tired of this somehow rebranding from murderer/rapist to eccentric security expert.

Just last week McAfee (no relation, anymore) filed an S-1.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24621764

I was thinking the timing was good since the OG JM hadn't been in the news lately...

McAfee has been at this for years. I guess it finally caught up w him. He was in some prison last year.

I met with people who work w him btw, he has an interesting group of compatriots

https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/john-mcafee-tweets-phot...

I hope the sentence is that he is forced to follow through on eating his d!#k

Background: (Maybe nsfw for language) http://www.dickening.com

He’ll say he would have but national TV isn’t allowed to film in prison.

I think he still has 85 days or something.

Man, this is gonna put a damper on his presidential campaign. [1]

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/john-mcafee-running-president-and-a...

Doubtful. Have you seen the current President?

Mr. Most Interesting Man in the World.

The IRS is a fun entity to have to fight off... good luck with that.

why didn’t he just renounce citizenship. he hasn’t been to america in a long time has he

renouncing US citizenship is a taxable event itself if you have a net worth greater than $2mm. IIRC, you have to pay what the capital gains would be on all your assets if you sold them that day. you also have to settle any other unpaid obligations. if john mcafee already doesn't feel obligated to pay taxes, I don't see why he would go through a formality that just triggers another tax obligation.

Even if you don't have a high net worth it triggers a 5 year tax audit and fees. My mate just handed in his passport even though he's been doing his W2's annually and he still had to pay $2k to renounce.

Yeah, that’s how US Americans can get dual citizenship in Germany. If the fee for renouncing is an "unreasonable burden" for you.

The $2k is the filing fee. Seems punitive when compared to other government fees.

Then why did Facebook’s cofounder do it to save $600M?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielmitchell/2012/05/11/faceb...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230336050457741...

I don't understand why he got the citizenship in the first place, it's not like he was born there. If you have a green card already, there's no reason to go for the citizenship. The cons far outweigh the benefits. You're always on the hook with American citizenship.

Eh, it's not that much worse. With a green card, you're still subject to the 5-year tax thing after you leave.

IMO the green card isn't worth it.

He didn't have a choice. His parents moved here and got US citizenship when he was under 18, and so he automatically became a US citizen.

>He didn't have a choice. His parents moved here and got US citizenship when he was under 18, and so he automatically became a US citizen.

That's just not true.

While I was born in the US, my (British) father moved here with two small children, and neither were made citizens "automatically."

50+ years later, my sister is a citizen, but she had to proactively do so. My brother still has a green card.

The applicable law didn't take effect until the Clinton administration....

So it would have applied to Sauverin but not to your siblings.

I was unaware of the change in the law.

I assume you're referring to the Child Citizenship Act of 2000[0], yes?

Thanks for setting me straight.

But I'm a little confused about that. I assume you're talking about Eduardo Saverin[1] the Facebook co-founder.

According to his Wikipedia page, he turned 18 (born 19 March 1982) before that law went into effect on February 27, 2001. As such, are you sure he was automatically made a citizen rather than going through the naturalization process?

[0] https://www.passportvisasexpress.com/news/article/child_citi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Saverin#Early_life_and...

you gotta love the impartial quality of the Forbes op-ed section

"It is very sad that America’s tax system is so onerous that some rich people feel they have no choice but to give up U.S. citizenship in order to protect their family finances. I’ve written about this issue before, particularly in the context of Obama’s class-warfare policies leading to an increase in the number of Americans “voting with their feet” for places with less punitive tax regimes."

guy makes it sound like some immigrant father with 10k in the mattress was going to get fleeced by the authorities

Sauverin wasn't originally a US citizen to begin with. He acquired US citizenship when his parents moved here when he was a child and he got citizenship automatically.

He left the US in 2009 and renounced his US citizenship several years later.

While he saved a lot of money on taxes by doing so, he had been living overseas prior to renouncing his citizenship and has remained overseas since doing so.

the answer is in the article you linked. he expected (correctly) that his equity was going to be worth considerably more after the IPO, so he renounced his citizenship before that happened. I have no idea what mcafee's portfolio looks like, but I'd guess he's not in the same situation. plus like he said, he doesn't feel obligated to pay taxes in the first place.

Maybe because he is running for president? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McAfee_2020_presidential_...

No he’s not

Yes I am (:

Well, "running" for president. Under a slogan of "Don't Vote McAfee", and with neither himself nor many of his campaign staff physically located in the country. (Indeed, it's likely that he would have been arrested upon entry, under the same charges that just got him arrested in Spain.) One gets the sense that he didn't take his "campaign" particularly seriously.

It isn't easy to do if you are rich, basically.

SEC hit him with civil charges too, btw those are dispelled by simply having a disclaimer, or another paragraph in a disclaimer so it hard to the position of the SEC and the character assassination in these charges seriously.

You can have the same tweets that also says *sponsored with 50,000 tokens and cash and speculators wont care and you are magically legal.

Dude writes faux Penthouse Forum letters as a hobby, apparently.

“We had not left the city more than ten minutes behind us when she began to caress my crotch, eventually freeing my dick from its confinement.”

https://loggiaonfire.com/magazine/'the_woman_in_nepal,_chapt...

So now who will be the next U.S. president?

I think (not sure) that the McAfee signs on this building[1] were removed in the last week or so. I wonder if that's related to this Indictment. Would McAfee the company have gotten an early warning to give them time to remove their sign?

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/McAfee/@37.3898838,-121.97...

So he hid money from taxes. Shameful, but not unexpected with his libertarian streak.

I'm not sure political sway has ever affected a persons motivation to hide taxes!

State senator Terry Link a couple weeks ago: https://www.daily-chronicle.com/2020/09/16/former-democratic...

That's actually an interesting question I don't think I've ever seen any real data on. Anecdotally, I find libertarians and Republicans to be far more likely to subscribe to anti-tax rhetoric than Democrats, but I don't know if that translates to any meaningful action in practice beyond the fringes.

...although in this specific case, McAfee is, well, kind of a fringe unto himself.

> That's actually an interesting question I don't think I've

> ever seen any real data on.

For sure, not exactly the sort of study you can get people to sign up to. Are you measuring how successfully they hide their taxes or how prevalent it is in that political sphere?

> Anecdotally, I find libertarians and Republicans to be far

> more likely to subscribe to anti-tax rhetoric than

> Democrats, but I don't know if that translates to any

> meaningful action in practice beyond the fringes.

I would guess that you might be a Democrat voter then? The reason I ask is because you might vote for them because they seem trustworthy, or they seem trustworthy because you vote for them.

Here's an illustrative case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Snipes#Income_tax_convi...

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