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NEWS
Mitt Romney tax records extortionist convicted on multiple charges, facing 25 years in jail
The man behind the attempted extortion of 2012 Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney has been found guilty on multiple charges relating to his failed shakedown.
Michael Mancil Brown, 37, of Franklin, Tenn., was convicted of six counts of wire fraud and six counts of using facilities of interstate commerce to commit extortion.
In August 2012 Brown sent a letter to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) claiming to have hacked the company’s servers and obtained the tax records of Romney and his wife Ann, and then demanded a million Bitcoin ransom to not make the files public; at the time Romney had been criticized for only releasing two years of tax returns whereas Brown claimed he had obtained pre-2010 returns.
Having failed in his attempt to extort PWC, Brown, using the name of “Dr Evil”, made a number of posts on Pastebin repeating the claim that he had hacked PWC and had obtained the records, then again demanded $1 million in Bitcoin from anyone who wanted to obtain them.
No one paid to obtain the records, and Brown instead was visited by a raid from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who seized evidence of his contacts with PWC and posts to Pastebin; interestingly the Feds never found proof that Brown ever had managed to obtain a copy of Romney’s tax returns.
“The success of this prosecution is due to the excellent online investigative skill and computer forensic analysis demonstrated repeatedly by the United States Secret Service in this era of increasingly high tech criminal conduct,” United States Attorney Jack Smith said in a statement. “Hackers, aspiring hackers and identity thieves are identified, caught, prosecuted and convicted because of the work and determination of the Secret Service to stay ahead of people who abuse new technology to commit age-old crimes of fraud and extortion.”
Brown faces up to twenty years in prison on the charges of wire fraud, up to five years in prison on the charges of extortion, fines of up to $250,000, and orders of restitution to victims.
A sentence hearing has been scheduled for August.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/ CC by 3.0
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