Kriti Mehrotra
Born on August 22, 1997, in beautiful Helsinki, Finland, Julius Aleksanteri Tomminpoika Kivimäki developed a keen passion for computers and the internet when he was just a young boy. In fact, according to his own account in HBO Max’s ‘Most Wanted: Teen Hacker,’ he spent most of his childhood exploring, experimenting, as well as enlightening himself with its intricacies. He thus ended up learning a lot, only to soon slip into the dark side and evolve into an infamous international hacker and cybercriminal, best known by his aliases of Ryan Cleary or Zeekill.
How Did Julius Kivimäki Earn His Money?
Since Julius has never shied away from admitting to his particular interests, he has also conceded that he spent most of his early years online to grasp different bits of knowledge and have fun. Therefore, he claimed school was boring to him by the time he was a tween because he felt as if he already knew what he needed to know, driving him to again turn to his computer for solace. That’s where he eventually found like-minded people, from whom he subsequently absorbed hacking — this was allegedly one of the only things to excite him at the time, so he got involved.
In the aforementioned original, Julius said, “It was mostly stupid kid stuff…, trying to cause drama or just have fun,” before going as far as to compare it to someone spraying graffiti on a wall. However, the truth is that his actions were not only criminal but also harmful to others, especially as he quickly became a member of hacking groups like Lizard Squad and Hack the Planet. According to records, he was only in his early to mid-teens by this point, but he was actively using aliases like Ryan Cleary or the character of Zeekill that he developed while in his gaming phase.
Julius’ self-prescribed monikers first caught the FBI’s eye in 2013 when they found a computer intrusion in an .edu domain, which led them to the cybercriminal group Hack the Planet (HTP). This worried them to such an extent, owing to the seriousness of the matter and allegations that Zeekill was enriching himself off the group’s activities, that they set up a sting operation. They never expected to find a Finnish 15-year-old when they executed their search warrant in the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he was staying to attend the hacker conference Def Con.
The FBI reportedly identified Zeekill as Julius, yet they couldn’t do anything else but search his as well as his parents’ devices before quickly letting them return to their homeland of Finland. There, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) was already working on a cybercrime involving the compromise of 50,700 computers through a denial of service botnet, which led them to Julius too. He was arrested in September 2013, but even after he ultimately pleaded guilty to 50,700 counts of aggravated computer break‑ins and related offences, he only received a 2-year suspended sentence since he was a minor.
Then, while Julius was a part of the Lizard Squad, he allegedly engaged in their high-profile denial of service attack on PlayStation and Xbox Live during Christmas 2014, which temporarily made them utterly unoperational. Some reports indicate he boasted about this exploit several times in the media, yet he didn’t face any legal consequences – as per records, this was again largely owing to the fact that he was still a minor. As if that’s not enough, it has been alleged that he was the one behind three false emergency calls – involving hostages, shootings, or explosives – targeting different families in the US in 2014.
According to records, Julius has even been accused of creating a fake security threat on a domestic flight in the US in August 2014, which resulted in the Air Force also getting involved. However, arguably his most lucrative hack was of the local private psychotherapy clinic Vastaamo’s database in 2020, from where he stole the therapy session notes of thousands of patients. He subsequently demanded a ransom of around €370,000 ($440,000) in bitcoin from the practice, and when refused, he tried to extort €200 to €500 ($250 to $600) from each individual in exchange for not publishing their records.
Julius Kivimäki’s Net Worth
While it’s true that Finnish officials were eventually able to identify Julius as the perpetrator in this harrowing case, they couldn’t arrest him because he had long fled the country. Thus, Interpol issued an international red notice against him in October 2022, just for him to be apprehended in Paris, France, in February 2023, after local police had responded to an unrelated domestic disturbance call. It turns out he had been living rather luxuriously under a fake name, with him later indicating in interrogations that he not only had a permanent address in London, England, but had also spent significant time in Southern France, Spain, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates, prior to his arrest. In other words, he reportedly spent a lot of the funds he stole in global opulence before getting sentenced to 6 years in prison for the Vastaamo data breach.
Julius spent over a decade as a hacker as well as a cybercriminal before he was ultimately arrested, making it safe to assume that he had managed to accumulate significant wealth for himself. Unfortunately, owing to the fact that his alleged means of earning money were entirely illegal, nobody but him really knows how much he made from each reported offense or each year as a whole. It doesn’t appear as if he ever held a proper job either, so we can only assume his overall wealth based on his alleged crimes, possible assets, likely investments, probable returns, and lifestyle expenses. Therefore, per our calculations, we believe Julius Kivimäki has a net worth of close to $1 million.
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