The shit really hit the fan over at massively popular file hosting site MegaUpload. Yesterday, the United States Department of Justice seized and shut down the site and commenced criminal cases against its owners and others, sparking retaliatory actions from hacker collective Anonymous.
Yesterday, following the DoJ indictment, the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand arrested MegaUpload founder Kim Schmitz (aka Kim Dotcom), CMO Finn Batato, co-founder and CTO Mathias Ortmann and others. Their subsequent bail request was denied in New Zealand court as it was opposed by US authorities on the case.
GigaOm has an excellent run-down of the indictment details if you’d like to learn more.
In the meantime, we got pinged by Elliott Kember, who was in New Zealand when the crackdown was in full effect. He traveled to Schmitz’ mansion and took a bunch of pictures of the property and the loads of expensive cars that were being seized. We got permission to embed some photos.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the US is looking to seize a great deal of property of the charged MegaUpload execs, including $175 million scattered across bank accounts worldwide, “a 2010 Maserati, a 2008 Rolls Royce, and a number of Mercedes Benzes”.
For a list of items seized, check out CNET’s article on the matter.
And now some photographic proof of the fact that the seized cars carried license plates that said things like ‘MAFIA’, ‘HACKER’, ‘STONED’, ‘V’ (for Vendetta?), ‘KIM COM’, ‘CEO’ and ‘POLICE’.
And check out that lovely pink Cadillac!
Comment