More than ten years after closing down, the illegal download site Megaupload continues to be talked about. If Kim Dotcom, its main instigator, has still not been extradited, it is one of his collaborators who has just been arrested, when he had managed to be forgotten for 11 years.
In the case Megaupload, the name Julius Bencko may mean nothing to you. Much less publicized than Kim Dotcom and some of his associates, the man nevertheless had an important role in the development of the illegal download platform. He was the graphic designer and it is to him that we owe the Megaupload logo, as well as the support for the Flash player on the site. But his role did not stop there, since he also held shares in the company.
Although Julius Bencko had so far managed to slip through the cracks, the authorities have finally arrested him. The man was arrested in a hotel in Prague and will soon be extradited to the United States, where he should serve his sentence.
Read also: Megaupload – ex-leaders plead guilty, Kim Dotcom is furious
Megaupload graphic designer arrested in Prague, 11 years after Kim Dotcom
When authorities arrested Kim Dotcom (since released on bail) and his associates in January 2012, Julius Bencko was missing. Was his case not of sufficient interest to the authorities at the time, or had he simply disappeared from circulation? We ignore it. Nevertheless, he had not completely disappeared from the radar : between 2012 and 2013, we saw him retweeting certain messages from the Megaupload affair. And in 2014, he posted videos on YouTube in which he showed the activity of his new business: the restoration of old automobiles.
But since 2014, Julius Bencko had been more discreet. Until Justice is interested again in his case, he who seems to have played an unsuspected role within Megaupload. An international arrest warrant was issued against him, and it was the Czech police who finally arrested the 46-year-old man in a hotel in Prague. According to the police, he was “armed with several knives”. But thanks to the intervention of the police, he offered no resistance.
Julius Bencko was much more than a graphic designer
How did Justice come to take an interest in the case of Julius Bencko? To understand it, we must return to its role within the Megaupload site. True, in 2007 Julius Bencko’s correspondence shows that he looked for links to illegal serial downloads. But Not enough to make Justice wink.
On the other hand, by consulting the history of his payments, the authorities eventually discovered that Julius Bencko had won over a million dollars in 2010 alone, thanks to its activities within Megaupload. In addition, he owned 2.5% of the company’s shares. It’s hard to imagine that his work only concerned the graphic part of the site.
Julius Bencko will be extradited to the United States, where he will serve a sentence of several years (we still do not know for the moment the exact duration of his imprisonment). By way of comparison, the two former Megaupload coders have just been sentenced to 3 years in prison by the New Zealand courts.
Source : TorrentFreak
