John McAfee has been running from the US law enforcement for years.
First, there was that complicated murder case against him, where allegedly he took out his neighbor over a dog quarrel. Then, there were the numerous shady business and tax evasion cases against him which seem to have put some weight on Interpol and 5 days ago came a report that he has been detained in Spain where he is currently held in jail, waiting for a possible extradition to the US on several counts of tax evasion for a number of years in a row.
This is a serious offence according to US laws and one should expect a lengthy sentence plus a hefty fine.
One of the counts against McAfee is for his 2017 very public "shilling" of a number of altcoins. For those who weren't around at the time, John used to have a "coin of the day" tweet which would usually cause a huge pump and dump in the price of that coin and allegedly he charged around 50 BTC per tweet. After a few weeks of that he switched to "coin of the week" and soon his influence was clouded in controversy, after the team of Verge had a twitter war with him over what they called "extortion" for promoting their coin. He later stopped this behaviour but not without shilling a few more coins (rather unsuccessfully if I may add).
Regardless what your opinion of John McAfee is. his influence in the world of crypto is undisputed. He amessed millions of followers on Twitter and has been in the top 10 influential people in crypto for the past few years.
This year he was running for president, in a "not-too-serious" fashion, with the reasoning that he wants to bring more awareness to crypto and he developed an "unhackable wallet" an exchange and was working on a mobile phone (a project that didn't go anywhere).
Since 2019 McAfee abandoned his love for Bitcoin, calling it a worthless coin on a few occasions and supported Monero and a few other privacy coins for a while, being quite upfront about not wanting to pay taxes. He later developed his own privacy coin but after a public spat with the developers of this project, it also tanked and has been unsuccessful overall.
Now that his decade-long run from the US authorities is over, the future is not too bright for the 75 year-old libertarian.
Utoday reports that he is having a "fascinating time" in Spanish prison, hanging out with drug dealers and murderers which was his regular company anyway.
According to rumours, he will be charged also for concealing up to $23 million, earned from promoting ICOs and other cryptocurrencies via his social media influence.
