Kim Dotcom

Kim Dotcom (né Schmitz; born 21 January 1974), also known as Kimble and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, is a German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur and political activist who lives in Glenorchy, New Zealand. Dotcom rose to fame in Germany in the 1990s as a hacker and an Internet entrepreneur. He was arrested in 1994 for trafficking in stolen phone calling card numbers. He was convicted on eleven charges of computer fraud, ten charges of data espionage, and various other charges in 1998 for which he served a two-year suspended sentence. In 2003, he was deported from Thailand to Germany, where he pleaded guilty to embezzlement in November 2003 and after five months in jail awaiting trial he received another 20 months suspended sentence. Dotcom is the founder and former CEO of the defunct file-hosting service Megaupload (2005–2012). In 2012, the United States Department of Justice seized its website and pressed charges against Dotcom, including criminal copyright infringement, money laundering, racketeering and wire fraud. Dotcom was residing in New Zealand at the time; at the request of US authorities, New Zealand police raided his home in 2012 and arrested him. Dotcom was granted bail and initiated legal proceedings to challenge his arrest and the police's search and seizure of evidence, a process that has stretched over a decade without resolution as of 2026. In 2017, a New Zealand court ruled that Dotcom could be extradited to the US on fraud charges related to Megaupload. Dotcom denied any wrongdoing and has accused US authorities of pursuing a vendetta against him on behalf of politically influential Hollywood studios. In 2018, the New Zealand Court of Appeal upheld the lower court's ruling. Dotcom appealed to the Supreme Court of New Zealand, which ruled in 2020 that Dotcom could be extradited to the United States, but that...