The Hacker Who Destroyed Hollywood

The war for the internet has begun. This is Kim. com, a notorious hacker.

I was a hacker. Probably one of the most famous ones in computer history and maybe a whole lot more, depending on which version of the story you believe. One of Germany's earliest tech entrepreneurs.

He had a knack for finding financial opportunities in technology. A traitor, a scammer, an activist, a visionary, a criminal, a scapegoat. We are going to use every weapon in our arsenal to destroy this guy.

Hollywood's number one enemy, a popular hub for illegally downloaded movies, a folk hero in the fight for internet freedom, a pro gamer, an eccentric multi-millionaire, a musician, an aspiring politician and marketing genius. Yeah, I like mega upload. Kim.

com may be many things, but one thing is for sure. He has changed the internet forever. And this is his story.

Mega upload. [Music] We originally spoke to German journalist Jana Kudla for their story. She and her team host a fantastic podcast series called Wild Wild Web.

The first season is dedicated entirely to kim. com. His story begins in the early '90s in Kio, a city in the north of Germany.

This is long before he launched the infamous file sharing platform Mega Upload before he became the most wanted man on the [Music] internet. Back then he was just Kim Schmidz. He will later claim he attended an elite boarding school in a castle and that he graduated with a special diploma for gifted students at just 17.

None of that is true. He actually went to a public high school for lower secondary education and lived in a home for troubled youth. This detail is significant as it highlights a recurring pattern throughout his story.

Kim has always tried to portray himself as more than he actually was, as bigger, better, and smarter than his peers. Kim's parents separate when he is young. His father is a violent drunk, so the boy often retreats to the safety of his bedroom.

There he discovers the magic of computers and becomes obsessed. He starts writing his own programs and gets involved in the early days of the internet before most people even knew what it is. By the early '90s, Kim is running what is essentially a server for trading pirated software.

And apparently he isn't just hosting it. He is eavesdropping on the users listening in on the emerging hacker scene. The trading platform also earns him his first money.

Around the same time, he debuts his now famous alias, Kimble, an homage to the main character in The Fugitive, who is wrongfully accused of murder and forced to flee from the authorities. This is Kim in 1992 in a grainy segment of German national TV, showing off how to make free phone calls worldwide by routing through the US. He claims he coded the software himself.

The show dubs him the nightmare of national telecommunications. A Forbes article claims he's the leader of an international hacker group called Dope and one of the most well-known hackers in Germany. Allegedly, he developed an encrypted tap proof mobile phone and sold hundreds of them.

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In the mid '90s, Kim is arrested for his shady dealings involving the software trading server. He's convicted in 1998 and receives a 2-year suspended sentence, but Kim remains undeterred. He uses his conviction to boost his hacker image.

Kimbo, the larger than life tech renegade. At the time, most journalists have no clue how computers actually work. In this climate, it's easy for Kim to turn myth into media headlines.

He claims to have hacked into City Bank and wired $20 million to Greenpeace. That is almost certainly made up. While City Bank had in fact been hacked a few years earlier, the hackers were Russian, not German, and they definitely didn't donate the money to Greenpeace.

Kim also claims to have breached both the Pentagon and NASA. Again, the hacks were real, but not carried out by him. People in the scene start having serious doubts about whether Kimbo even has the skills to pull off any serious hacking.

But scattered skepticism doesn't than Kimble's carefully crafted image. He doubles down on his reputation and launches a cyber security firm called Data Protect. The logic is simple.

Who could better protect you from hackers than the most dangerous hacker himself? data protect takes off and he starts to make serious money. In 2000, he sells 80% of the company.

It's the peak of the com boom and Kim has ideas. Some are actually ahead of their time, like an early version of two-factor authentication years before it became a thing. Then there are also ideas like the Mega Car, a concept car with an onboard computer, built-in video conferencing, and 16 SIM cards for mobile internet on the highway.

It never hit the market. In any case, Kim becomes a rising star in the business world and he shares his extravagant lifestyle online. Hello everybody, this is Kim.

com. This is my girlfriend. This is my car.

This is my cow storage. This is my beach. This is my sky.

What the [ __ ] Private jets, luxury cars. During peak. com mania, he claims he'll rescue the flailing e-commerce startup let's buy it.

com and he makes a headline grabbing appearance on a German late night show to sell the story. In truth, Kimbo never actually saves that firm. He buys up shares on the cheap, pumps the stock with media hype, and then cashes out.

That's textbook insider trading and illegal. He tries to flee to Thailand but fails. He slept with another 20-month suspended sentence and a €100,000 fine.

Most of his ventures go belly up and as the global. com bubble bursts and triggers a full-blown economic crisis. Kim decides to immigrate to Hong Kong.

He launches a new string of sketchy ventures and shows off even more fancy cars. Let's skip ahead a bit. It's 2005 and Kim.

com is about to change the internet forever with mega upload. The idea is deceptively simple. It's essentially a cloud service, a site where people can upload files for others to download them years before Drpbox and Google Drve.

No accounts, just links. It doesn't take long for people to realize that Mega Upload makes it very easy to share entire movies and fulllength music albums. Kim is not the first to offer this kind of service, but Mega Upload just works extremely well.

A lot of storage for the time, fast downloads. The company quickly morphs into a sprawling network. Some of you may still remember the sister site Mega Video and its infamous 72minute time limit.

At its peak, Mega Upload is the 13th most popular website on the internet. With 50 million users a day, it accounts for a whopping 4% of global online traffic. This is before Spotify and Netflix.

Back then, people would spend a small fortune on DVDs and CDs, around $20 for Spider-Man 2, 16 for the new Green Day album, and all of a sudden, it's all out there for free. Hollywood and the music industry quickly realized they're missing out on massive chunks of revenue. So in the early 2000s, they declare war on piracy.

First, they sue Napster into the ground. A federal court ruled Monday, Napster must stop allowing music fans to swap copyrighted material. Then comes the DVD scare ad era.

But none of that is stopping Mega Upload. For years, authorities struggle to get a grip on the platform, and no one really knows who's behind it. It used to be owned by Kim Schmidtz, but Mega Upload denies any further connection to him.

The site is now registered to a company called Veester Limited, which belongs to some Finnish guy called Kim Tim Jim Veester. Of course, Finnish Kim and Kimbo are the same person. He used his distant Finnish ancestry to get hold of a second passport.

And for a while, that smoke screen actually allows him to hide an illegal gray zone. But in 2011, Kim just can't resist stepping back into the spotlight. He publicly declares that he is the mastermind behind mega upload.

That's when Kim Schmidz and Kimbo give way to a whole new identity, kim. com. By now, he is living large in New Zealand in a mansion by the sea.

He is collecting luxury cars and uses his free time to become one of the top ranked Call of Duty players on the globe. He's got a wife and kids and it almost feels like his wildest years are behind him. Maybe he thinks he's far enough from the US to be safe, out of reach because instead of keeping his head down, Kim lashes out and he takes on the global music and movie industries head first.

[Music] I use mega upload. His mega upload song from 2011 is extremely provocative. Some of the biggest pop stars of the day appear in the music video, publicly backing a platform that Hollywood sees as the embodiment of internet piracy.

Supposedly responsible for billions in losses. Universal music sues mega upload. The music video keeps getting pulled from YouTube.

And this is just the beginning. The media start calling Kim. com the movie industry killer.

With his mansion, his fleet of cars, and his private shopper, he doesn't look like a tech renegade anymore. He becomes the Dr No of Hollywood. Clumsy effort, Mr Bond.

You disappoint me. Okay, maybe more like Dr Evil. [Music] Either way, he becomes a scapegoat.

Open. On January 20, 2012, New Zealand police raid. com's Auckland mansion at dawn.

At the request of the FBI, more than a dozen heavily armed special forces storm the property. They call it Operation Takedown. They seize luxury cars, designer watches, and hard drives.

Simultaneously, there are raids across eight other countries. In Germany, police confiscate a brand new Mercedes Kim just got his mom for Christmas. The FBI takes over Mega Upload.

All sides of the company go dark. The authorities claim that Kim. com is the ring leader of an international criminal enterprise, that his platform has been built from the ground up to traffic stolen digital content, and that everything else, the branding and business model, is just a front to cover up its real purpose.

According to US prosecutors, he and his accompllices have caused half a billion in damages while making $175 million for themselves. Now Kim is facing extradition to the states and up to 55 years in prison. But is that really the whole story?

Is Kim. com actually a criminal mastermind? His defense is pretty straightforward.

He says he basically invented Google Drve before Google did. That Mega Upload was just a platform and that he couldn't be held accountable for what users chose to up or download. But under US law, being a file sharing platform doesn't just give you a free pass.

You have to actively make sure copyrighted content isn't being shared illegally. And the indictment documents say he did too little too late. Kim, of course, insists otherwise.

He says Mega Upload had systems in place to take down copyrighted material upon request. He claims his platform even provided big Hollywood studios with the tools to remove the content themselves. But prosecutors argue that Mega Uploads supposed good intentions were just a front.

Behind the scenes, they run a rewards program, paying users to upload popular shows and movies. The platform also supposedly dragged its feed on takedown notices, keeping content online longer to rack up more clicks. Yanuk Nutler and her team have reviewed leaked mega upload documents and emails.

They suggest Kim and his crew were fully aware of what was going on on their platform. Kim insists the whole thing is a massive political conspiracy. He's never been able to provide any proof.

But the full-blown international raid and the threat of 50 plus years behind bars that does look like authorities are trying to make a point turning Kim. com into an example. And there is a political layer to this story.

The US film and music industry do in fact have massive lobbying power. For example, the then head lobbyist for Hollywood's biggest trade group, MPAA, was a close friend of then Vice President Joe Biden. And Biden has a reputation for being tough on online piracy.

Over 10 years pass. Kim. com relaunches Mega.

He dabbles in New Zealand politics. He gives interviews, hops on creator live streams, and stars in documentaries. His story is turned into a best-selling book, and he's even getting his own biopic.

A German public broadcaster is producing a six-part series on Kim. com's rise, Fall, and Digital Rebellion, a gripping, high energy minisseries about the life of the internet's most audacious outlaw. For a decade, he fought his extradition with all that he's got.

Appeal after appeal, hearing after hearing. But in August 2024, New Zealand's justice minister signed the order. Kim.

com will be extradited to the US. He faces charges of copyright infringement, money laundering, and raketeering. Just months later, in November 24, Kim suffered a serious stroke.

He hasn't said much since. Just one post on X saying he's in recovery asking for patience and prayers. So, who is Kim.

com really? An internet freedom fighter or a ruthless criminal? The truth, as always, is messy.

He's charismatic, funny, larger than life. A guy who dreamed up ideas long before the tech world turned them into reality, but also a guy who spreads wild conspiracy theories and loves to take credit for things he most likely didn't do. Someone who can read the room, hack the system, and turn it all into a spectacle.

Yes, he built a platform that made piracy easy. But in a world where the old media giants were losing control, com was turned into the perfect villain, the poster boy for a digital wild west they couldn't contain. At the end of the day, Kim.

com held up a mirror to an industry that had completely slept through the internet revolution and was desperate to stop the clock from ticking.