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 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

Company denies the allegations made by a Paramount exec, who included it in a list of top ‘rogue’ Web sites.

MediaFire is no ‘rogue’ Web site and is not run by any criminal gang, says Tom Langridge, one of the co-founders of the file-hosting service.

In a letter to CNET, Langridge has responded to comments made on Friday by Alfred Perry, vice president of worldwide antipiracy for Paramount Pictures. Perry appeared on a panel during the On Copyright conference at Columbia University.

MediaFire is not operated by an outlaw gang; we are in fact a group of reputable entrepreneurs with diverse backgrounds who have a history of building innovative and valuable websites and technologies. Over the last several years, we have been focused on releasing numerous updates to MediaFire’s professional and business services. For example, just in the last month we launched our document viewing system and rebuilt our image system – not the kind of features that incentivize illegal activity.Unlike the other sites on Paramount’s list (including MegaUpload), MediaFire doesn’t artificially construct download limitations (speed, number of downloads, size, etc.) in order to drive subscriptions nor have we ever paid users to upload content. Our premium customers get the same transfer rates, servers, and resuming capabilities as our free customers. Our paid services enhance the feature set that is most relevant to professional and business customers like usage statistics, custom branding tools, and multi-seat accounts.

MediaFire cooperates fully with the MPAA, RIAA, and various other organizations who work to identify and prohibit the distribution of copyrighted content. We have a variety of advanced automated systems designed to detect violations to our Terms of Service and automatically warn and terminate users.

Many of these systems were updated, extended, and enhanced to deal with abuse stemming from unscrupulous users looking for a new venue following the shutdown of MegaUpload. These enhancements have received rave reviews from organizations monitoring copyrighted content. 

More:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57407711-261/mediafire-to-hollywood-studios-were-no-outlaw-gang/

Previously:

MPAA wants more criminal cases brought against ‘rogue’ sites – Top five ‘rogue’ cyberlocker services named
http://vrritti.com/2012/03/31/mpaa-wants-more-criminal-cases-brought-against-rogue-sites-top-five-rogue-cyberlocker-services-named/

Where Are The Top 5 “Rogue” Cyberlockers Services Located?
http://vrritti.com/2012/03/31/where-are-the-top-5-rogue-cyberlockers-services-

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a brief on behalf of an Ohio man in a federal court case brought by the United States against Kim Dotcom, founder and owner of the file-sharing locker Megaupload. The brief requested that Kyle Goodwin, and users like him, be allowed access to the files they had stored on the currently shuttered site.

Goodwin is a local high school sports reporter and the sole proprietor of the company OhioSportsNet, who stored his video footage on Megaupload.com as a backup to his video library on his hard drive. He had paid €79.99 (about $107) for a two-year premium membership. Just days before the government seized the site, Goodwin’s hard drive crashed. The brief states that his lost videos include footage to make highlight reels for parents to send to their children’s prospective colleges, and an unfinished full-length documentary about the Strongsville girls soccer team’s season.

More:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/megaupload-user-asks-for-his-perfectly-legal-videos-back.ars

Dr. Waterman’s report ultimately concluded that 90.2% of all daily downloads on Hotfile are infringing, opposed to 5.3% that are clearly non-infringing.

Hotfile, however, felt that this report painted an inaccurate description of their daily activities and went on to hire an expert of their own to look into the validity of the report.

The file-hoster commissioned Daniel Levy, Managing Director and founder of Advanced Analytical Consulting Group. His job was to evaluate how representative the MPAA-funded report is for the alleged infringements on Hotfile from the site’s inception up to the start of the lawsuit in January 2011.

TorrentFreak managed to obtain a copy of this confidential report which tears the MPAA-funded study apart. The main conclusion of Dr. Levy is that the Waterman report gives “no scientifically reliable estimate of the incidence of allegedly infringing behavior through the Hotfile website.”

http://torrentfreak.com/hotfile-researcher-discredits-mpaa-funded-piracy-study-120328/

At WorldHostingDays I presented a statistic about the percentage of revenues MegaUpload represented to Carpathia Hosting. Although my sources were credible and corroborated, after further investigation, I believe that statistic to be wrong.

I’d received this statistic from a European host I believed had good information on the number and I’d also vetted it with another industry insider who believed it to be relatively accurate. Carpathia strongly disputes the statistic. To ensure that I’m providing accurate information, and out of respect for Carpathia, I chatted with Phil Shih at Structure Research, a person I trust as a source of unbiased information. Phil did some back of the envelope calculations based on publicly available information. His conclusion: there’s no way that MegaUpload represented nearly the percentage revenue I’d been led to believe. Rather, if anything, it is in the single digits.

http://www.thewhir.com/blog/worldhostingdays-megaupload-clarification

What we do know is that:

• There is 25 Petabyte stored on more than 1,000 “Mega” servers facilitated by Carpathia
• Carpathia argues it is currently costing them $9,000 per day to merely facilitate the non-functional servers. That would be $3,285,000 annually. One wonders whether it would make a difference when the company would be facilitating fully functional server infrastructure. In any event, we need to assume that the company was charging MegaUpload much more than this and that payments will have been made for many years during which MegaUpload was a client of either Carpathia or Leaseweb.
• The indictment shows an example of a $9 million USD payment transferred through PayPal, Inc. by a member of the MegaUpload Conspiracy to hosting provider Leaseweb in the Netherlands where, according to the indictment, 690 “Mega” servers were located. Could this put the guesstimate for Carpathia with its 1,000 servers at 13 million USD for the same period of time? How much would the total amount have been for the entire period of time when MegaUpload was a client at each of these providers? In any event, the indictment also mentions examples of payments by MegaUpload to Carpathia’s CFO directly, totalling 1.46 million USD. Again, one wonders just how many payments like this the justice department was able to uncover and how many payments like this were made to the two hosting providers and/or their CEOs directly during the time MegaUpload was their customer.
• In 2011 The Dutch OCOM Group, owner of hosting provider Leaseweb, datacenter EvoSwitch, Network services company FiberRing and provider of modular datacenters DataXenter enjoyed a total revenue of 50 million EUR.
• In 2009 the revenue generated by Leaseweb individually would amount to 36 million EUR.
• Carpathia Hosting’s revenue for 2010 is estimated at 52.9 million USD.
• The indictment also mentions examples of various payments by MegaUpload to one of Leaseweb’s carriers called Cogent Communications which totalled 30 million USD from February 2009 to July 2011. Could that amount reflect the amounts paid to Carpathia and Leaseweb and/or their CEOs during the same window of time? How much would the total amount have been?
• Updated on 13th April 2012: The US government claims that Carpathia has generated $35 million from working with MegaUpload.
• Updated on 14th April 2012: MegaUpload put Carpathia on the map. The company was largely unheard of 2009. That was when researchers from the University of Michigan and Arbor Networks reported they had discovered something unusual. In July that year, that 0.6 percent of all Internet traffic for the month was delivered by a little known Web hosting service: Carpathia.That was equivalent to double the amount of bandwidth consumed by Facebook and nearly half of all of Microsoft’s Web properties, including Bing, Forbes noted in a story from November that year. The researchers traced the massive traffic wave to a deal Carpathia had struck a year earlier to service MegaUpload and the other sites operated by founder Kim DotCom: Megarotica, Megavideo, Megaclick. Forbes’ reporter Andy Greenberg wrote then that the sites had “become the digital equivalent of the Somalian coastline in the fight against online piracy.“

In any event, the above does not give credibility to the “single digit” assessment when the payments noted are being combined and extrapolated taking into account the overall amount of time MegaUpload has been with Carpathia and Leaseweb individually.

Previously:

Internet Lawyer David Snead’s Quote About MegaUpload Gets Censored. WHIR Author Liam Eagle Doesn’t Say What Percentage Of Carpathia’s and Leaseweb’s Revenue Had Been Generated By The MegaUpload Operation
http://vrritti.com/2012/03/28/internet-lawyer-david-sneads-quote-about-megaupload-gets-censored-whir-author-liam-eagle-doesnt-say-what-percentage-of-carpathias-and-leasewebs-revenue-had-been-generated-by-the-megaupload-op/

MegaUpload represented 25 percent of Carpathia Hosting’s revenue, and 30 percent of LeaseWeb’s revenue
http://vrritti.com/2012/03/24/megaupload-represented-25-percent-of-carpathia-hostings-revenue-and-30-percent-of-leasewebs-revenue/