A Swedish man has been found guilty of attempted murder after sending a mail bomb to a bitcoin firm based in London.
According to detectives from London’s Metropolitan Police Service, 43-year old Jermu Michael Salonen sent the mail bomb following a refusal by Hackney-based Cryptopay to change his password.
As initially reported by the City A.M., Salonen had emailed the firm last year in August requesting a password reset, but his wish was denied by the customer service team because it would violate the company’s privacy policy. According to local police, the mail bomb was not a dud.
“Salonen seemingly made and sent a device that had the capability to seriously harm and even kill over something as inconsequential as a change of password,” Commander Clarke Jarrett, the head of the Metropolitan Police Service Counter Terrorism Command, said.
Sheer Luck that Bomb Didn’t Go Off
It is not clear when Salonen sent the mail bomb but the bookkeeping firm, The Accountancy Cloud, which once counted Cryptopay as its client, received the package sometime in November last year. An employee of the accounting firm started opening the padded envelope this year in March but fortunately stopped halfway through when they grew suspicious.
Additionally, the employee’s technique of opening the envelope helped forestall a disaster, according to Jarrett:
“It was due to sheer luck that the recipient ripped opened the package in the middle rather than using the envelope flap which would have activated the device.”
After obtaining DNA from the package, the Met Police were, however, unable to match it to anyone on its database. This resulted in the case being handed to Interpol who matched it to the Swede who was known to the authorities there. A search was conducted in Salonen’s home in Gullspang where various bomb components were found. Salonen was arrested in May and will now serve a six-year jail sentence.
Habitual Threatener
Besides the half a dozen years in jail, Salonen will also serve an additional six months for issuing death threats to more than 20 politicians and celebrities in Sweden last year. Salonen will also face justice over a minor drug-related offense.
Indian Teen Threatens to Blow Up Miami Airport after Losing Bitcoin https://t.co/p4ket9ukHP
— CCN (@CryptoCoinsNews) November 6, 2018
This comes less than a week after an Indian teenager threatened to blow up the Miami International Airport over what he saw as lack of cooperation from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in assisting him to get back bitcoin worth approximately US$1,000 that he lost to a fraudster based in the United States.
Unlike the Swede, however, the teenager from the state of Uttar Pradesh only made threatening phone calls to the airport but did not make good his threat or even demonstrate the capacity to carry out the act. He has, however, been charged by Indian police with several offenses including issuing threats.
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