Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwipippa
This was the top news story on New Zealand TV last night. 4 of these guys live in my city (Auckland). The first 3 pages of the NZ Herald are devoted to it this morning. There is a picture of a car trailer taking away $6 million worth of cars that have been seized ("including 15 Mercedes Benz, a 1959 pink Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce Phantom", with number plates like "KIMCOM, HACKER, STONED, GUILTY, MAFIA, GOD and POLICE").
Kim Dotcom lives in a mansion worth $30million and $100million of cash has been seized from various bank accounts. Apparently police arrived in 2 helicopters and Kim Dotcom had barricaded himself inside.
We are getting saturation coverage, I never realised how big this thing was. Obviously huge money in piracy.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwipippa
In case anyone feels sorry for him, here's a photo of his house. http://media.nzherald.co.nz/webconte...11_460x230.JPG
He rents this place. He applied to buy it in 2010 but was it was declined because "Associate Finance Minister Simon Power and Land Information Minister Maurice Williamson decided he did not meet the "good character" test to buy land here.
(land over a certain value purchased by foreigners requires approval).
Bet the Ministers are pleased they made that decision now. |
The fact that they made a lot of money is not proof of wrongdoing. I don't know much about how they run their business, but the service they provided was legitimate, even if it was used illegitimately. According to the Wikipedia article on Megaupload, they have 81 million unique visitors (I presume that it is per month), and a "Reach" of 4%. I don't know what that means, but I presume that means the percentage of visitors that use their service. 4% would be about 3.2 million users. If each paid 5$ per month for the service, that would be 16 million dollars a month, 192 million per year. For the kind of service they provide, I can't imagine many people being willing to pay more than a few bucks a month for legitimate uses. If they were charging quite a bit for the service, such as 10 or more dollars a month, then that would indicate that the vast majority of users were buying memberships for illegitimate reasons.