A Tennessee man has been captured and charged with six counts of wire fraud and six counts of extortion for trying to blackmail former presidential nominee Mitt Romney and an accounting firm into paying him $1 million.<\/p>\n
The Justice Department on Wednesday<\/span> announced that PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, an accounting firm, received an \u201cA scanned signature image for Mitt Romney from the 1040 forms The sender threatened to publish the documents unless the Similar letters were sent to Democratic and Republican party One of the recipients was Peter Burr, chairman of the Williamson \u201cI was thinking this thing very possibly has viruses on After receiving the anonymous threats, PricewaterhouseCoopers The Department of Justice on Wednesday<\/span> released the “Brown devised a scheme to defraud Romney, the accounting firm
\n34-year-old Franklin resident Michael Mancil Brown was indicted
\nby a federal grand jury in Nashville for a scheme that took place
\nduring Romney\u2019s 2012 campaign for president.<\/p>\n
\nanonymous letter last August from a sender who claimed to have
\nhacked into the firm\u2019s computer network and stolen Romney\u2019s tax
\ndocuments for the years before 2010. Romney had only publicly
\nreleased two years\u2019 worth of tax returns, and critics demanded to
\nsee a full picture of his finances.<\/p>\n
\nwere scanned and included with the packages, taken from earlier
\n1040 tax forms gathered and stored on the flash drives,\u201d<\/i> the
\nletter said, according to a POLITICO report.<\/p>\n
\naccounting firm deposits $1 million in Bitcoins \u2014 a digital
\ncurrency \u2014 into an online account. The letter came with computer
\nthumb drives, which the sender said were encrypted with the
\ndocuments. The letter threatened to send copies of the tax
\nreturns to \u201call major news media outlets\u201d<\/i> with passwords
\nto open the documents if the demand was not met.<\/p>\n
\ngroups throughout Franklin, Tenn., asking for Bitcoin donations
\nin return for copies of the documents. Some letters said that the
\ndocuments would be published in return for $1 million in Bitcoin.<\/p>\n
\nCounty Democratic Party. Burr told POLITICO that he received a
\npackage with the thumb drives and immediately dismissed it as a
\njoke.<\/p>\n
\nit,\u201d<\/i> he said. \u201cThe last thing I want to do is trash our
\ncomputer.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
\nreleased a statement claiming that there was no evidence their
\nsystem had been accessed, and the Secret Service found no
\nevidence of a break-in. The Secret Service and the FBI jointly
\nlaunched an investigation into the incident.<\/p>\n
\nstatement announcing the capture and indictment of the suspect.<\/p>\n
\nof PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and others by falsely claiming that
\nhe had gained access to the PricewaterhouseCoopers internal
\ncomputer network and had stolen tax documents for Romney and his
\nwife, Ann D. Romney, for tax years prior to 2010,\u201d<\/i> the
\nstatement says.<\/p>\n