Less than a week after the legal consequences of hacking caught up with infamous Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm in the form of a guilty verdict, the last co-creator still enjoying his freedom has been apprehended, according to TorrentFreak,
Convicted alongside Pirate Bay masterminds Svartholm, and Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij was found to be eluding his sentence at the border between Laos and Thailand.
Neij’s Laos residency wasn’t exactly a state secret, as a 2013 documentary discovered that the pirate (also known as TiAMO) was living a low-profile life in the Asian nation. He even got married there after being found guilty of crimes related to his copyright infringement activities.
Thai border police suspects that Neij and his wife may have moved freely between Laos and Thailand for the past couple of years, crossing the frontiers an estimated 27 times. Incredibly enough, he dodged the local authorities the entire time, finally getting caught while driving in the North-Eastern Thai city of Nong Khai.
As you’d expect, the law enforcement agency responsible for catching the online torrent lord is now flashing the arrest as a big victory against cyber threats. Judging from pictures of the press conference where the booking was announced, the cops responsible for the capture are digging the cameras and publicity too, maybe more so than the satisfaction of putting a baddie away.
Wanted by international crime fighting agency Interpol, Fredrik Neij is currently being kept in the Bangkok immigration office, and is awaiting deportation to Sweden.
There, the 36-year-old computer specialist will face a prison term.
Remember when we said that stealing confidential data from the Web was a bad idea? Well, here’s another lesson for you.
Running from the police is never a good idea either, and it rarely ends well for whoever is trying to evade capture.
