Franklin Man Convicted in Mitt Romney Tax Hack Hoax Gets Four Years

A Franklin man was sentenced to four years in federal prison this week for fraud and extortion related to 2012 claims he had hacked copies of Mitt Romney's tax returns.

Michael Mancil Brown was convicted in May on six counts of wire fraud and six counts of extortion. During the 2012 presidential campaign, he wrote the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers, claiming he had hacked the firm's internal computer system and stolen the tax forms for the one-time Republican presidential nominee and his wife, Ann.

He threatened to release the returns unless he received the equivalent of $1 million of the digital currency Bitcoin. In other correspondence, Brown said he would release the returns to interested parties - including the media - if the same amount of Bitcoin were deposited into another account. Similar letters were delivered to the Williamson County Democratic and Republican party headquarters.

"All major news media outlets are going to be sent an encrypted copy of the most recent tax years that your company had on file since you did not have them all in a convenient electronic form. The years before 2010 will be of great interest to many. If the parties interested do not want the encrypted key released to the public to unlock these documents on September 28 of this year then payment will be necessary," a statement posted on Pastebin at the time said. "And the same time, the other interested parties will be allowed to compete with you. For those that DO want the documents released will have an different address to send to. If $1,000,000 USD is sent to this account below first; then the encryption keys will be made available to the world right away. So this is an equal opportunity for the documents to remain locked away forever or to be exposed before the September 28 deadline. Who-ever is the winner does not matter to us."

An investigation, spearheaded by the Nashville office of the U.S. Secret Service and assisted by the FBI, determined that Brown had, in fact, not hacked the firm nor did he have the tax documents.

U.S. District Judge Billy Roy Wilson of the Eastern District of Arkansas, who presided over the case in Nashville, also ordered Brown to pay $201,836 in restitution to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Image via Ryan Hutton/Boston University News Service, used under Creative Commons