Tiina Parikka was half-dressed when she read the email. It was a Saturday in late October 2020, and Parikka had spent the morning sorting out distance learning plans after a Covid outbreak at the school where she was headteacher. She had taken a sauna at her flat in Vantaa, just outside Finland’s capital, Helsinki, and when she came into her bedroom to get dressed, she idly checked her phone. There was a message that began with her name and her social security number—the unique code used to identify Finnish people for healthcare, education, and banking. “I knew then that this is not a game,” she says.
The email was in Finnish. It was jarringly polite. “We are contacting you because you have used Vastaamo’s therapy and/or psychiatric services,” it read. “Unfortunately, we have to ask you to pay to keep your personal information safe.” The sender demanded €200 in bitcoin within 24 hours, otherwise the price would go up to €500 within 48 hours. “If we still do not receive our money after this, your information will be published for everyone to see, including your name, address, phone number, social security number, and detailed records containing transcripts of your conversations with Vastaamo’s therapists or psychiatrists.”
Parikka swallows hard as she relives this memory. “My heart was pounding. It was really difficult to breathe. I remember lying down on the bed and telling my spouse, ‘I think I’m going to have a heart attack.’”
Someone had hacked into Vastaamo, the company through which Parikka had accessed psychotherapy. They’d got hold of therapy notes containing her most private, intimate feelings and darkest thoughts—and they were holding them to ransom. Parikka’s mind raced as she tried to recall everything she’d confided during three years of weekly therapy sessions. How would her family react if they knew what she’d been saying? What would her students say? The sense of exposure and violation was unfathomable: “It felt like a public rape.”
Therapy had been Parikka’s lifeline. Now 62, she’d had three children by the time she was 25, including twins who had been born extremely prematurely in the 1980s, weighing only a few hundred grams each. One grew up with cerebral palsy; the other is blind. Parikka spent years juggling medical emergencies, surgeries, and hospital stays with a demanding job and a crumbling marriage. “During those years, nobody ever asked me, the mother, ‘How are you?’”
She divorced in 2014 and met her current partner a year later. By then, her children were adults with independent lives. After decades of putting everyone else’s needs before her own, she should have been finally able to exhale. Instead, she had a breakdown. “I had full-scale anxiety running through my body all the time. I couldn’t sleep. I had panic attacks. I couldn’t eat.” Driving at high speed on the highway one day, dark thoughts descended. “I was thinking, I wouldn’t mind if this car crashed.”
In search of urgent help, she went to Google, which led her to Vastaamo, Finland’s one-stop digital shop for people in search of psychotherapy. No doctor referral was necessary. She managed to book a session for the very next day. “It was that easy.”
Being able to confide in a total stranger felt liberating. She told her therapist things she had never told another soul. “Trauma in relationships. The disappointment and tragedy of having disabled children, and the influence it had on my life,” she says. “Silly things, childish things. It’s very human to feel hate, anger, rage.”
After Parikka read the email that left her struggling to breathe, she had no idea where to turn for help. She ran…She called the emergency services, but the police told her to get off the line; they needed to keep it free for real emergencies. In her bathrobe, phone still in hand, she felt completely alone.
But Parikka was far from alone. Across Finland, 33,000 people who had used Vastaamo were discovering that a hacker had obtained their therapy notes and was holding them for ransom. These were people who, by definition, were likely vulnerable and in need of help. Each was experiencing a deeply personal terror. In a country of only 5.6 million people, everyone knew someone who had been hacked.
Some victims’ notes had already been selected and published for the world to see. Three days before the extortion emails were sent, someone using the handle “ransom_man” posted on the dark web, on r/Suomi (the Finnish-language subreddit), and on Ylilauta, Finland’s equivalent to 4chan. This time, the post was in English. “Hello Finnish Colleagues,” it began. “We have hacked the psychotherapy clinic vastaamo.fi and taken tens of thousands of patient records, including extremely sensitive session notes and social security numbers. We requested a small payment of 40 bitcoins (nothing for a company with yearly revenues close to 20 million euros), but the CEO has stopped responding to our emails. We are now starting to gradually release their patient records, 100 entries every day.”
There was a link to the dark web, where 100 records were already on display. Directly below it, ransom_man signed off the post with a single word: “Enjoy!”
The 100 records included those of politicians, police officers, and prominent public figures. Their names appeared alongside therapy notes containing details of adultery, suicide attempts, pedophilia, and sexual violence. Some of the records belonged to children. And whoever was behind the hack kept their word: the next day, 100 more patient records were uploaded.
Some victims desperately searched the dark web to see if their records were out there. Some paid the ransom, scrambling to get bitcoin as the clock ticked down. Lawyers representing the victims have told me they know of at least two cases where people took their own lives after discovering their therapy notes had been hacked.
But for all of them, it was already too late. At 2 a.m. on October 23, 2020—the day before the emails began arriving in tens of thousands of inboxes—ransom_man had uploaded a much larger file. It contained every record of every single patient in Vastaamo’s database. Everyone’s therapy notes had already been published, for free, for the entire world to see.
Who was behind the biggest crime Finland had ever known? And could they have been motivated by something other than money? I spent 18 months trying to answer these questions, following leads across Europe and the U.S. They culminated in a visit to a prison and one of the most chilling conversations I have ever had.
Finland has been ranked the happiest country on Earth by the UN for the last eight years in a row. A world leader in childcare and education, Finland is also famously hi-tech: it’s the most digitalized country in Europe, renowned for its communications sector (as the home of Nokia) and leading the way in cybersecurity and AI innovation. But Finland is also a place of extremes. It has more heavy metal bands per capita than any other nation. In the far north, for the few days around the winter solstice, the sun does not rise.
Vastaamo had long been considered an example of how Finland was getting digital technology right. Founded in 2008 by entrepreneur Ville Tapio and his mother, Nina, a psychotherapist, the aim was to make therapy accessible to the masses and remove the stigma of asking for help. The platform made it easy for people to see who was available, where, and what therapeutic approach they specialized in. The logo had t…The color palette of a first-aid kit, with white lettering in a green speech bubble. “Vastaamo” means “a place for answers.” It was an attractive platform for therapists, too: they didn’t have to worry about marketing or billing—Vastaamo would take care of all that. The company even provided a behind-the-scenes digital interface where therapists could make and store their notes. This formula, combined with the increasing demand for therapy services, meant Vastaamo grew fast. It opened its own network of around 20 clinics across Finland, employing more than 220 psychotherapists by 2018, leading some in Finland to refer to it as “the McDonald’s of therapy.” In the years before Zoom and Teams were part of our daily lives, the remote therapy also offered by Vastaamo was groundbreaking. In 2019, a private equity firm bought a majority stake in the company, earning the Tapio family a payout of more than €5 million.
Meri-Tuuli Auer, 30, describes using Vastaamo as “like Uber for therapy—convenient, accessible, relatively cheap.” She picked her therapist because he offered cognitive psychotherapy—and she liked his photo. “He looked nice. He looked approachable.”
Auer’s home, on the outskirts of Helsinki, is a riot of pink. There are Barbie dolls, Barbie books, and Barbie-themed handbags on her shelves, as well as a glittery open-top Barbie sports car. A pole-dancing pole takes pride of place in the center of her living room.
“I’m a mixed personality,” she tells me over tea in Moomin mugs. “I love being around people, but I get that inkling, that doubt: maybe they all think I’m full of shit and stupid and ugly and I have no idea what I’m doing.” Auer has struggled with depression for much of her life. When she was 18, she was in a secretive, difficult relationship with a man 29 years her senior, which made her self-esteem plummet further. She was drinking heavily. “If I hadn’t gone to therapy, I don’t know what would have become of me. Maybe there is another universe where I didn’t make it to 30.”
Most of the cost of Auer’s treatment was covered by the Finnish healthcare system; she paid only about €25 for each weekly session. She was making great strides. “After going to therapy in 2018 and 2019, I had gained a basic sense of security. That was lost in 2020.”
Vastaamo’s CEO knew the company’s patient registry was being held to ransom weeks before his customers found out. On September 28, 2020, Ville Tapio received an email demanding the bitcoin equivalent of €450,000 to keep it safe. Sample patient records attached to the email proved the extortionist wasn’t bluffing. Tapio called in a cybersecurity firm to investigate.
Medical information is an obvious target for would-be extortionists, says Antti Kurittu, the security specialist Tapio hired. But this was something else: “Whatever I tell a therapist is, by its very nature, a lot more private than what my blood pressure is,” he says, drily.
Kurittu used to be a detective, investigating cybercrimes for the Finnish police; he says he insisted they be told about the ransom attempt so they could begin a parallel investigation. Meanwhile, he began inspecting Vastaamo’s server, looking for clues as to who might be behind the hack—and one of the first things he noticed was how lax security had been. “It was definitely unfit for purpose for storing this kind of information,” he says. He tells me that the patient records database was accessible via the internet; there was no firewall and, perhaps most egregiously, it was secured with a blank password, so anyone could just press enter and open it. Kurittu determined that whoever had hacked Vastaamo had probably just been scanning the internet in search of any badly secu…The hackers were looking for valuable databases they could profit from. “They tested various bank vaults to see which ones were unlocked and accidentally found this one,” explains Kurittu.
Our most private secrets—things we would never want exposed to the world—are out there online.
For several weeks, the hacker and Vastaamo communicated via email, but Vastaamo never considered paying the ransom. Doing so would mean trusting a criminal’s promise to delete the records. Plus, Kurittu notes, it goes against the Finnish character. “Finns can be a stubborn bunch. We’re not known for paying ransoms quietly or easily, which is a point of national pride for me.”
After the hacker, using the alias “ransom_man,” began leaking patient records to pressure the company, Kurittu closely monitored the server used to publish them. He suspected the person behind the attack was either Finnish or had lived in Finland for a long time, as they knew which notable names to highlight from the patient files.
When Auer learned about the breach, she downloaded a browser to access the dark web for the first time. “I thought to myself, I just have to check if my records are there,” she says. She didn’t find her name in the first batch posted and closed the file without reading anyone else’s records. But she saw others discussing what they had seen. “People had already picked out what they thought were the funniest parts of the patient records. They were laughing at these people’s pain. A 10-year-old child had gone to therapy, and people found it amusing.”
Auer began to spiral. “I shut myself in at home. I didn’t want to leave; I didn’t want anyone to see me,” she recalls. She had little hope the hacker would be caught. “It’s not that I distrust the Finnish police—it just seemed like an impossible task.”
However, the much larger file that ransom_man had uploaded to the dark web—containing all of Vastaamo’s patient records—also held crucial clues to his identity. The first three batches of therapy notes were posted manually, but when the hacker tried to automate the process, he accidentally uploaded not only all the therapy notes but his entire home folder. The file was only briefly online before being taken down, accompanied by a post that read “whoopsie :D”—but ransom_man had made a critical mistake.
“After spending several evenings with the file, I had a feeling I’d seen this kind of thing before,” Kurittu says. The data on the hacker’s home drive wasn’t systematically organized into folders, as one might expect from someone running extortion as a business. “It had that chaotic, passionate hobbyist feel to it.” There was also something eerily familiar about the childish way ransom_man had named some files (the one containing all the patient data was called “therapissed”).
Kurittu’s mind went back to 2013 when he was a senior detective constable with the Helsinki police and the file names he’d seen on a computer seized from a 16-year-old boy. “It made me think of Julius Kivimäki.”
Aleksanteri Kivimäki—who used to go by his middle name, Julius, or the online handle “zeekill”—had long been notorious among cybersecurity investigators. Not for any exceptional hacking skill, but because he seemed willing to go further than most who dwell in the darkest corners of the internet.
At age 14, Kivimäki was involved with a group called Hack the Planet (named after the tagline from the 1995 movie Hackers). They would breach large companies and boast online about what they had stolen. “It was for the laughs,” says Blair Strater, a former hacker from Illinois who interacted with Kivimäki in internet relay chat forums at the time. “You notice that something is open, and you just go for it.””Take it. It’s not targeted.”
This type of hacking was about gaining online clout and impressing others, not about extorting money. However, some participants may have believed they were serving a noble cause by exposing security flaws in major corporations or highlighting the hypocrisy of cybersecurity firms that claimed to advise businesses but couldn’t secure their own networks.
At first, Strater found Kivimäki amusing. “A lot of the things he did early on were objectively funny,” he tells me over Zoom from his home in Illinois. When I ask if I would find them funny, he clarifies that his sense of humor was an acquired taste, best suited to 4chan. But in 2010, when Strater was 17 and Kivimäki was 14, they fell out over who would publish a report about a recent hack.
Soon after, pizzas and Chinese takeout began arriving at the home Strater shared with his parents and younger sister on the outskirts of Chicago. Each time they answered the door, the delivery driver would ask for Julius Kivimäki. “Taxis were ordered. Escorts were ordered,” Strater says. “My father had to turn away a dump truck filled with gravel.” Strater also received a flood of letters from credit card companies, insurance agencies, and government offices, including one from the Social Security Department confirming an appointment for him and his spouse—Julius Kivimäki.
Then, at 2 a.m. one morning, police in body armor, carrying guns with laser sights, showed up at the Strater family home. They were responding to a report that Blair had beaten his mother to death in a drug-fueled rage. When his mother answered the door, the police took her blood pressure to confirm she was alive. This was the first of many “swatting” attacks the family would endure. After a brief lull, Strater learned that someone using his name had emailed a bomb threat to a local police officer, leading to him spending three weeks over Christmas in a juvenile detention center.
Several years into their feud, in 2015, someone hacked Elon Musk and Tesla’s Twitter accounts and tweeted that anyone who called the Straters’ landline or showed up at their home would get a free car. Their phone rang nonstop for days, and Blair’s father had to turn away several disappointed people from their porch. Someone using Blair’s mother’s name posted a threat to shoot up the elementary school where his 10-year-old sister was a student. His mother’s LinkedIn and Twitter accounts were hacked and filled with juvenile, racist posts, along with antisemitic insults directed at the healthcare statistics company where she worked. Within months, she lost her job.
The campaign of terror lasted for many more years. Strater says it will never truly be over. “It’s like having cancer: it’s never really cured; it goes into remission,” he explains. “Every so often, someone would reach out and say, ‘Hey, I was one of the people who helped Julius do these things.’ Sometimes they’d say, ‘He made me do them. He was blackmailing me,’ which is something he does to an awful lot of people. I want to make this very clear: I am not the person zeekill messed with the most.”
Indeed, Kivimäki set his sights far beyond the Strater family. In August 2014—just days after his 17th birthday—he called in a fake bomb threat that grounded a flight carrying John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, who oversaw PlayStation’s multiplayer network. A group calling themselves Lizard Squad claimed responsibility, posting almost nonsensically on Twitter that the attack was in sympathy with Islamic State. Lizard Squad struck again on December 25, 2014, with a cyber-attack that shut down Xbox and PlayStation, ruining Christmas morning for millions. Brazenly, Kivimäki gave interviews to BBC 5 Live and Sky News as a Lizard Squad spokesperson, claiming they did the attacks.He hacked both for amusement and to expose the poor cybersecurity of Microsoft and Sony. He seemed to revel in the chaos and drama. He appeared on camera on Sky News using a fake name, but his boyish face—blond hair, blue eyes, plump cheeks—was visible for all to see.
In July 2015, following an investigation by Finnish police, Kivimäki was convicted of hacking into servers at MIT and Harvard, as well as money laundering and fraud. He was found guilty of more than 50,000 data breaches and received a two-year suspended sentence. His computer was confiscated, and he was forced to repay over €6,000 obtained through his crimes. He never faced justice for the offences he committed against Blair Strater and his family.
Shortly after receiving his suspended sentence, Kivimäki updated his Twitter bio to read “untouchable hacker god.”
He spent the next few years traveling the world. During lockdown, he lived in an air-conditioned apartment in Westminster, just 20 meters from MI5’s central London headquarters. He traveled to Dubai, Hong Kong, Barcelona, and Paris. According to the images he posted online, he was living the life of an international jetsetter. But in the end, he was not untouchable.
Police made a micropayment of 0.1 bitcoins to the hacker known as “ransom_man.” They traced the money after it was laundered into real-world currency and transferred into Kivimäki’s bank account. The home folder that ransom_man had accidentally uploaded led police to several servers, one of which had been paid for with a credit card linked to Kivimäki—the same card he used for Apple services and an OnlyFans subscription.
As investigators examined the history in ransom_man’s home folder, they discovered that the hacker had searched not only for keywords like “rape,” “abuse,” and “child molestation” in the patient records database but also for Kivimäki’s home address and the names of his family members. “Before publication, he ensured there was no harmful information about him or people close to him,” said Pasi Vainio, the lead prosecutor on the case. Those searches were made from an IP address linked to Kivimäki’s Westminster apartment. “He was in London when the crimes were committed.”
But the investigation was drawn-out and arduous. There were terabytes of data to comb through. The crime had so many victims that police had to create an online portal for them to register and give statements. This generated more than 21,000 criminal reports, each needing individual attention. It wasn’t until October 2022—two years after Parikka, Auer, and the other victims received their ransom demands—that Vainio signed an arrest warrant for Kivimäki. His face, chubby-cheeked and floppy-haired, was added to Europol’s list of most-wanted fugitives, alongside murderers and drug traffickers.
On February 3, 2023, French police responded to a report of domestic violence in a flat in a Paris suburb. Officers used a battering ram to enter the property and found a man and a woman inside. The man was pale with white-blond hair, but when asked to identify himself, he handed over a Romanian passport under the name Asan Amet. “We have a Scandinavian-looking guy, 195cm tall,” Vainio recalled with a smile. “I think the French police just thought something’s off.” They checked their databases and discovered Amet was one of Kivimäki’s known aliases. He was handed over to Finnish authorities a few weeks later.
“I don’t know what I had expected, but I was surprised to see that he looked so normal,” Auer said. “He looks like a regular Finnish young man. It did make me feel like it could have been anyone.””I heard that he was in a court hearing,” Parikka says. “We have a habit—every night at 8:30 p.m., I lie here on the couch with my spouse and watch the main news. Without warning, Kivimäki was there on the screen. Kivimäki came into my living room.” She glances over to her couch, just meters away from where we sit, and is overcome with tears. “I didn’t sleep the next night.”
But when the trial began in November 2023, Parikka was determined to watch Kivimäki face justice. It was impossible to invite more than 21,000 registered victims to court, so the proceedings were relayed to public spaces like cinemas, allowing plaintiffs to watch in real time. In a case centered on privacy and anonymity, it was a profoundly awkward setup. “We were all sitting far apart,” Auer says. “It was dead silent.” Parikka had a similar experience. “We pretty much kept to ourselves.”
On April 30, 2024, Kivimäki was found guilty on all charges—including 9,600 counts of aggravated invasion of privacy and over 21,300 counts of attempted aggravated extortion—and sentenced to six years and three months in prison. That’s a long sentence by Finnish standards, though less than the seven-year maximum he could have received. His appeal is currently underway.
Even if his conviction is upheld, he will be a free man by the end of this year.
“The sentencing scale is too low, in my opinion. But that’s the framework we have in Finland,” Vainio says. He tells me a colleague tried to quantify the harm caused, using a conservative estimate that each person endured a week of agony due to the hack. “When you multiply that by the number of victims in this case, you get 635 years of suffering.”
Now 28, Kivimäki has served much of his sentence in a spotless, bright, but suitably austere facility in Turku, southwest Finland, a two-hour train ride from Helsinki. For months, he refused to grant me an interview, but while I was in Finland reporting this story, he changed his mind. As I sat in silence in the prison’s visitor room for what felt like hours, watching the clock tick behind a panel of reinforced glass, I wondered if Kivimäki was trolling me—if he had dragged me there just to derail my other scheduled interviews, with no intention of ever leaving his cell. But after 40 minutes, he appeared. With his white-blond hair, ice-blue eyes, and razor burn, dressed in a black T-shirt and shorts, he looked like an overgrown teenage boy.
He didn’t do it, he says; he’s simply a victim of his own notoriety. “They had to find somebody. They just chose someone who was convenient for the story.” When I point out the enormous amount of circumstantial evidence linking him to the hack, Kivimäki is defiant. “The obvious answer is that it’s just somebody close to me.” He has an idea who it is, he continues, but he isn’t prepared to name names.
It seems very selfless to do time for someone else’s crime, I say. I tell him Parikka described having her therapy notes held for ransom as feeling like a public rape. “I’m sure that’s how she felt,” he replies blankly. “It’s quite remote to me. I’m involved in that I was in court over this stuff, but I didn’t do it. It’s just another story in the news.”
As a fellow human being, rather than the person convicted of the crime, I ask, what’s your response to people taking their lives after having their therapy notes stolen? “There are a lot of terrible things going on in the world. I don’t really feel any differently about this. I turn on the news and there are people dying in Gaza or wherever. It’s like, how do you feel about that? I think the honest answer for most people is that they just… don’t.” You don’t?Do you have anything to say to the victims?
“Not really,” he replies. “These are nameless, faceless people.”
“There’s only one question I would ask Kivimäki,” says Parikka. “It would be: ‘Was there ever a moment when you felt empathy?’ I don’t think he can put himself in anyone else’s shoes.” She pauses. “I believe he really needs therapy.”
Vastaamo was declared bankrupt in February 2021. Days after patients received ransom emails, the board announced it had fired the CEO, Ville Tapio. In April 2023, Tapio was found guilty of criminal negligence in handling patient data, but his conviction was overturned on appeal in December 2025. (He declined my interview requests.)
“I’ve actually been angrier at Ville Tapio than at Kivimäki,” says Auer. “As CEO, he was responsible for ensuring the company was prepared for all kinds of risks and had proper cybersecurity. It seems that was never a priority for him.” What was his priority? “Making money. He ran a very successful business.”
“I think the Tapios originally wanted to help people and make therapy accessible,” Parikka says. “Now there are perhaps thousands of people who will never go to therapy again because they can’t trust anymore. And that’s really terrible.”
Along with more than 6,000 other plaintiffs, Auer and Parikka are part of a civil case suing Kivimäki for damages. Despite the lavish lifestyle he portrays online, he claims not to have the money to pay; so far, no one has been able to locate his assets. The government has agreed to compensate victims—anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand euros, depending on how many pages of their therapy notes were in Vastaamo’s database and how sensitive the content was—but the amount will likely be symbolic. How can you ever repay the harm of being exposed like this?
Copies of the patient files have been circulating since they were first leaked in October 2020. At one point, someone even created a search engine to browse the database. This doesn’t surprise Parikka. “Kivimäki isn’t one of a kind,” she says. “I understand human curiosity. People want to know.”
Others are just as willing as Kivimäki to cross moral and legal lines—for money, for online attention, out of morbid curiosity, or simply for laughs. In May, Finnish police announced a second suspect in the Vastaamo case: a U.S. citizen living in Estonia, suspected of aiding Kivimäki by helping prepare the files. He has been charged with assisting in attempted extortion.
In an age when AI models are trained on our Zoom calls, emails, and social media posts, it’s naive to think anything can ever be completely secure. The human need to confide in others can be met in countless ways online. In a world of unprecedented connectivity, can our deepest secrets ever be truly safe?
Kivimäki believes we’re all holding onto analog expectations of privacy in a digital world. “So many of our worst secrets—the absolute worst things we might never want shared with the world—exist online. They’re in some company’s database,” he tells me. “Everyone’s photos, everyone’s message histories.” He looks straight at me. “You fundamentally want to believe in privacy. But I don’t know how you’ll ever achieve it.”
Intrigue: Ransom Man, Jenny Kleeman’s six-part series for BBC Radio 4, is available now on BBC Sounds.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about the untouchable hacker god and the largest crime in Finlands history presented in a clear and natural tone
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What is this largest crime in Finlands history
It refers to a massive data breach in 20222023 where the personal and financial data of nearly every patient of the psychotherapy center Vastaamo was stolen and then used for blackmail
2 Who was the untouchable hacker god
That was the online persona used by Julius Kivimki a Finnish hacker He bragged about his skills and claimed he was untouchable by law enforcement
3 So Julius Kivimki was the mastermind
Yes In February 2024 Julius Kivimki was found guilty by a Finnish district court as the sole perpetrator of the Vastaamo data breach extortion and aggravated dissemination of information violating personal privacy
4 What exactly did he do
He hacked Vastaamos patient database twice stole highly sensitive therapy notes for over 33000 people and then in 2022 he began blackmailing both the company and individual patients threatening to publish their notes unless they paid a ransom in Bitcoin
5 Why was this crime considered so large
Due to its unprecedented scale and cruelty It didnt just target a companys finances it weaponized the most private and vulnerable thoughts of tens of thousands of people causing widespread psychological trauma and fear
Advanced Detailed Questions
6 How was he finally caught if he was an untouchable hacker
International police cooperation was key Despite using sophisticated methods like the Tor network and cryptocurrencies investigators traced cryptocurrency transactions and digital footprints He was arrested in France in February 2023 under a European Arrest Warrant
7 What was his sentence
In March 2024 he was sentenced to 6 years and 3 months in prison The court found him guilty of over 30000 counts of aggravated extortion and data crimes
8 Did he have a prior criminal record
Yes Kivimki had a long history of hacking from a young age As a teenager
