First the US Justice Department raided Kim Dotcom’s sprawling New Zealand estate and seized random items from cars to Predator statues. Then they shut down the massive website, froze their assets and threw seven men into a New Zealand jail pending an extradition trial.
Dotcom and his cronies weren’t the only ones felling the pinch, though. Megaupload’s 180 million reported users were left locked out, unable to access their files. Now those files might be deleted forever as soon as Thursday.
The word comes from a letter to Megaupload from the US Attorney indicating that since the Justice Dept. already executed their search warrants, they were done with the servers. Because of past due bills, the management was delegated to the storage hosting companies, Carpathia Hosting Inc. and Cogent Communications Group Inc, who can start wiping the servers as soon as this Thursday, February 2, 2012.
Megaupload’s legal team is actively seeking the help of the prosecutors to prevent the data genocide.
Upon filing the charges against Megaupload, the company’s funds were frozen. Without cash Megaupload cannot pay the past-due bills to turn the servers back on. However, Megaupload’s lawyers are arguing that the company needs its servers and the files they contain for the company’s legal defense. Hopefully, if the this tactic is successful, users will once again gain at least read-only access to their files.
“Megaupload’s assets were frozen by the United States. Mega needs funds unfrozen to pay for bandwidth, hosting, and systems administration in order to allow consumers to get access to their data stored in the Mega cloud and to back up the same for safekeeping.” MegaUpload lawyer Ira Rothken told TorrentFreak.
Megaupload might be gone forever. Many of its users probably learned their lesson to entrust critic data to the cloud. But won’t someone please think of the innocent files? Someone?
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