vRRitti.com, providing sentiency

Highlights:

• Every self-respecting teenage netizen (and a good few older users besides) knows that Megaupload is a veritable cornucopia of illegal music, films, games, and software uploaded to the site by its users and downloaded by millions of others.
• Before the site was shut down in January, it was said that as much as 4% of the global internet bandwidth usage passed through its servers.
• There is particularly scant information to be had about his Finnish roots, for instance.
  Dotcom has a Finnish passport, and he has changed his name in Finland on a number of occasions.
  He has relatives in Turku.
• Kim told the TorrentFreak blog his father was an alcoholic “who used to beat my mother and myself into hospital many times”.
• As a teenager, Schmitz began to hang out with hacker types, using the sobriquet Kimble, after “Richard Kimble”, the hunted protagonist in the classic TV-series The Fugitive. This name stuck as a long-term alter ego.
• At the age of 18, he bragged in an interview with Forbes magazine that he had hacked the access codes to the PBX systems (private branch exchanges) of hundreds of US companies, and he claimed that “every PBX is an open door to me”. In actual fact… he couldn’t write a single line of code.
• The real hackers could not abide the conceited and motormouthed Kimble. On their message boards he was mocked and reviled, and in the end he was kick-banned from the German hackers’ Chaos Computer Club. ”Kim didn’t know anything about computers, but he could talk a good game”, says former hacker turned IT entrepreneur Andreas Zauner, interviewed for a January article on Dotcom in The Australian.“He was great at copying. He nicked the ideas for all of his file-sharing websites from others, but he was very convincing and he could be extremely charming when he wanted. He could turn shit into gold.”
• Schmitz then harnessed his hacker reputation to the data security business.
  In 1994, he set up a company in this branch called DataProtect. Only a couple of months after the launch, he was arrested for hacking and credit-card fraud offences committed as a minor.
  Schmitz and a former flatmate from Munich Thomas Schuchhardt had been selling stolen account numbers to phone calling cards, and they had also made a bundle with credit-card scams.
  Schmitz spent time in custody, but got off with a two-year suspended sentence.
• He told the Sunday Telegraph he owned a venture capital company worth USD 200 million.
  He also claimed he had hacked Citibank and had transferred USD 20 million to Greenpeace.
  Greenpeace refutes the Citibank story and says it is pure fiction.
• In 2001, Schmitz hired a film-crew, rented a fleet of Ferraris, and drove with his pals to Monaco to watch the Formula One Grand Prix, spending his time in the resort on an 81-metre chartered luxury yacht moored offshore, and in the company of a bevy of Playboy models. This boys-with-toys road trip was worked up into an absurd half-hour “documentary” entitled Kimble Goes Monaco.
• Schmitz appeared from nowhere as an unlikely business angel to rescue a stricken Dutch web company named LetsBuyIt.com. This so-called “e-tailer” was fast heading for bankruptcy when Kim bought up a load of the stock for around EUR 400,000 and announced he was going to inject the equivalent of EUR 50 million more to save the day. This splendid turn of events – the arrival of a white knight on a charger – so entranced investors that they “piled into the stock”, according to a report in The Guardian newspaper, sending the share price up by more than 200%. Nothing was heard, however, of the promised Schmitz millions, which did not exist. Instead he rapidly divested his own holding in the company at a hefty profit. The e-commerce company went bust, and Schmitz netted approximately EUR 1.3 million on the dodgy deal and the spiked share price.
• Schmitz had announced he was setting up a “guerrilla army of computer programmers” named YIHAT – Young Intelligent Hackers Against Terrorism – that would track down and cut off funding to terrorist groups worldwide. “He struck me at the time as a surprisingly credible businessman”, recalls Batey over the phone. ”But when I started digging a little deeper I noticed that his story was full of inconsistencies and his lifestyle was, well, eccentric. When his economic crimes came to the surface, I was convinced that this was one wily and intelligent man.”
• With his reputation in tatters over LetsBuyIt, and with the prosecutors on his trail, Schmitz shut down his old website http://www.kimble.org and fled to Asia. He did not last long on the lam.
  In February 2002, a few days shy of his 28th birthday, he was apprehended at Bangkok International Airport and was deported back to Germany to await trial. He spent three months in police custody and eventually got a fine of EUR 100,000 and a suspended sentence of 20 months for the stock price manipulation. In late 2003 he received another rather lenient two-year suspended sentence for fraud, having obtained an unsecured loan worth 280,000 euros under false pretences.
• Towards the end of the last decade, Kim “Kimble” Schmitz gradually slipped off the radar of publicity.
  He moved his business operations to Hong Kong and changed his name several times. At the same time, he began to make more use of the Finnish citizenship he was born with from his mother’s side of the family. The recent New Zealand court decision to bail Dotcom can be unearthed from the Net, and it reveals that he owns two Finnish passports, the older one of which – in the name of Kim Tim Jim Vestor – dates from 2005. The Helsinki Register Office has information on the changes of name.
  In June 2005, Kim Schmitz became Kim Vestor. In July 2007, Vestor had become Dotcom.
  The first name has changed from Kim in 2005 to Kim Tim Jim, and then back again to plain Kim in 2010.
• For a good long while, Dotcom was able to cover his involvement with Megaupload.
  Rumours abounded on the Net, but as late as October 2009 Megaupload representative Bonnie Lam denied to Forbes Magazine that Dotcom had anything to do with the company.
• It is a shame that Dotcom’s Finnish connections are so terribly vague. Nonetheless, there is one clue left. According to information gathered by Helsingin Sanomat, in connection with his passport application Dotcom has given the address of his sister – or possibly a stepsister – in Turku.
  Telephone calls, Facebook messages, and emails to the occupants of the house do not produce any response, however. There is nothing for it but to make the trip to Turku. The door is opened to the HS journalist by a man in a leather jacket. After a brief pause, a woman believed to be Dotcom’s sister comes to the door. She reports that she has not received any of the attempts at communication from the newspaper desk. She says she changed her telephone number quite some time ago. There had been strange calls and “the police were listening in”. The leather-jacketed man stands unwaveringly in the doorway throughout our short exchange. Everything comes to an abrupt halt when the name Dotcom is mentioned. ”On that subject, I am not in a position to say anything whatsoever”, the woman replies.
  The conversation is over. The entire situation feels really rather weird.
  Pretty much like everything else in Kim Dotcom World.

Kim Dot-Conman? Part II
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Kim+Dot-Conman+Part+II/1329103739222