Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz, 21 January 1974), also known as Kimble and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, is a German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur and political activist who resides in Queenstown, New Zealand. He first rose to fame in Germany in the 1990s as an Internet entrepreneur.
Dotcom is the founder of now-defunct file hosting service Megaupload (2005–2012). Earlier, he achieved notoriety in Germany as a teen hacker who received a two-year suspended sentence for selling identities that he had siphoned from telephone operators' client database. Since the closure of Megaupload, he has been accused of criminal copyright infringement and other charges, such as money laundering, racketeering and wire fraud, by the U.S. Department of Justice. On 20 February 2017, a New Zealand court ruled that Dotcom, as well as co-accused Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk and Carter Edwards, could be extradited to the US on fraud charges related to Megaupload. Dotcom denies any wrongdoing and has accused US authorities of pursuing a vendetta against him on behalf of politically influential Hollywood studios. On 5 July 2018, the New Zealand Court of Appeal upheld the lower court's ruling. His lawyer said that he would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.