Ransom Man: 6. Nameless, Faceless People

I've been working on this story for more than a year.

“I've met victims who had their most private secret stolen, held to ransom, and then dumped”

online for all to see. I've met the people faced with the daunting task of getting justice for those victims. But there's one person I'm yet to speak to. The man convicted of the biggest crime in finished history.

I want to know if he's a hacker genius or simply a cold opportunist who just stumbled

upon a gold mine of badly protected data. I want to know if he can empathize with his victims and whether he did it for the ransom money or for the laws.

“I need to know all this to understand if the hack was a one-off, a product of a specific”

place and time perpetrated by an unusual kind of human being something exceptional or an

example to the rest of the world of something that could still happen to any of the

intimate data we upload every day. But so far Julius Kivimaki has refused to meet me. And then on my final day in Finland. So he said yes, Peter, his lawyer, says he agrees. My producer Sam and I junk all our other interview plans and get on a train to Tushku

“in southwest Finland where Kivimaki is serving his sentence.”

It's a two-hour ride from Helsinki. I'm looking at the window, lots of lovely pine trees, beautiful scenery, blue sky, but we're on a way to a prism. I still don't quite believe it. Even though we're traveling all this way, several hours on the train, I just have a feeling

he could be messing with us. And how are you feeling? I'm feeling pretty calm about it. I don't want to fall into the trap of romanticising him or building him up to be some criminal mastermind, I'm not that scared of him, I am going into this with an open mind

and a steady pulse. We're arriving Tushku far too early, we jump in a cab to the prison, a suitably serious brown brick building surrounded by a high white perimeter fence topped with razor wire. Hello, I am here to visit Mr Kivimaki. It's Jenny Kliemann from the BBC.

We're searched, we go from one waiting room into another and then a guard comes to fetch us. Take our seats in a spotless, bright visitor's room. It looks like the movies, you know, per-spec screens, there's a telephone in front of me and there's a desk on the other side of per-spec's, opposite me. Maybe he's not going to come, it's about, well, it's four minutes past one and we've

I'm beginning to think that Kivimaki is trolling us, that he's dragged us over to Tushku so

“he can derail the other plans we had scheduled with no intention of ever leaving his cell.”

But finally, after 40 minutes, a door opens.

Hello, hi, I'm Jenny. Hi. Finally, Alexandre Julius Kivimaki is there in front of me, albeit behind a per-spec screen. He's tall and imposing with white blonde hair, ice blue eyes and a bit of razor burn. He's wearing a black t-shirt and little black shorts, which makes him look like an overgrown

teenage boy instead of a 27-year-old man. The screen between us reaches from floor to ceiling. It means we can't put a microphone on Kivimaki, but we can hear his voice through the vents on the table in front of us. How's life in prison?

It's been my time when we were exercising, reading, cooking. What kinds of things are you reading? It's very broad now. Right now, I'm working through all the book or price winners. And what are you cooking?

The groceries, actually, is a little limited, it's not like all foods, but trying to delve it with that very limited amount of vegetable stay on her. He keeps up with the news, he tells me, he watches CNN, reads the financial times, but his online access is severely restricted in here.

“Is it hard for you to be without the internet because you were online so much?”

I don't know, I mean, I haven't been spending that much time on the internet for years anyway. Really? Really? That's worthy.

You've got bored of it, the whole internet bored you. Yes. Kivimaki seems to want me to believe he's left the online world behind. Barely two minutes into this interview, he's already trying to steer the narrative. But you spent a lot of time on the internet when you were younger.

Do you think that you're saying you grew out of him? Yeah. This is just not true. When he disappeared from custody towards the end of his trial, he couldn't stop himself uploading images of his luxury lifestyle, even though it led the police to him.

But you were still posting, like during the trial, you were posting pictures of yourself and stuff like that. Yes, sure. So nice. And you don't miss the kind of online community that you once had.

He's still trying to get me to believe that the hacker scene is a thing of the past for him. Really? Four. He's fixing me with those ice blue eyes, calm, unflustered, totally in command of himself.

He wants to be in control of this story. Peter warned me I might have only 15 minutes with Kivimaki. I have to get answers from him. Did you hack into Vastamo and try and export money from people using their therapy notes as bargaining chips?

No. You didn't do it. So why are you here? There's a few questions. The story keeps changing.

He's got a point here. The story has changed.

Two days earlier, news broke, but the finished police had identified a second suspect, living

in Estonia, a man believed to have given Kivimaki technical help. They still think Kivimaki was the driving force behind the hack. No accomplice was mentioned during his trial. And if ransom man was actually ransom men, that's a big deal for Kivimaki, because he's appealing his conviction.

He thinks this new suspect changes everything. Do you know who this person in Estonia is? I have a big idea. You have a big idea. Are you going to tell us who it is?

No. Is it somebody who you know?

“It's somebody I think I will be very good now.”

Okay. The police, their position is like the existence of this person, doesn't change anything in terms of their case with you. Well, do you see that? Say that.

Hmm. They're not all in that. The court acknowledged that there wasn't really any single piece of evidence that

actually tried to make any specific crimes, and it was basically well, don't have any

other people who could be in the war, so yeah. Why do you think they pinned it on you? I think the story, I mean, is the reach. I think the prosecution would say that they found so many pieces of evidence linking you that you'd have to be the unlocious person in the world to popped up in so many places

connected to this crime if you weren't involved. I'm really the better answerers, and the obvious answerers, that there's just somebody who goes to me.

to point fingers.

For me, I just can't imagine doing time for a crime I didn't commit if I had an idea

who did commit it. See, I didn't know for sure. The hack itself, do you think it's a bad thing that it happened? One of the people I spoke to, she said she felt like it was like being raped in public, having her therapy notes held against her, I mean, what do you make of that?

“Well, I'm sure that's how she felt that, it's quite remote to me.”

It's quite remote to him. It's another story of the news. Just another story in the news. When I asked him about the people who killed themselves, after they found their notes had been released, he shrugs, I don't find that surprising, he says.

On a human level, do you have any response to that, just as a fellow human being?

You could ask anybody on the street about this. Well, I'm asking you, anybody on the street. And then, Kivimaki says something that stops me in my tracks. He starts talking about other tragic events that make the news, like the deaths of civilians in Gaza, and how, when he hears about them, he feels nothing.

He thinks that other people also feel nothing. There's a lot of terrible things going on in the world, I don't really feel any differently about this.

“And I turn on the news and there's people dying of the outside of the world, or whatever.”

It's like, couldn't you go about that? In the honest answer, for most people is that they just don't, because it's news that's something that you're involved in. Just news, you don't have anything to say to the victims. No, not really, these are, the name was to take some people.

Name this faceless people. It turns out that Kivimaki is happy to give me much more than just the 15 minutes I'd been promised. Tom's folded behind the Perspects screen. He tells me about his London pad, the parties he used to go to in Davos, and how out of

practice he is with Finnish, now that he's so rarely speaks the language. He's determined to present himself as too big for Finland, let alone a Finnish prison cell.

I wonder if he was always like this.

What were you like when you were younger? I'm just saying, I don't even school, but that was the war. You were bored. He tells me he could read by the time he was too, and even though he started school a year early, aged six, he knew everything already, so they moved him up too, grades.

What's going to happen to be really easy? Have you ever had therapy? You have? As a child. Are you happy to talk about why you had therapy?

Yes, I mean, I was starting to go. There were children whose therapy notes were stolen and released into the world. Yes, I'm happy to have mine worked. When you were younger, you did some things that you've done time for, and there's some things that you've admitted.

And you did some really stupid things. Can I ask you about those really stupid things? Those really stupid things had very serious consequences. In the USA, Blair Stratis says his life was ruined. He had three tons of gravel and armed police sent to his door.

Blair was sent to juvenile detention. He told me it had cost his mother her job. The few that you had with Blair Stratis, did you send pizzas to him and gravel to him

“and bomb threats and did you get his mother fired from her job?”

No. I knew that order could eat some but no longer had snow getting his mother fired, no gravel. You didn't hack into her to trick out him? No. No.

I didn't. You know who did who was it? Not got any names. You're not going to name names. When it comes to some of the other stupid things he's accused of doing, like hacking into

Xbox and PlayStation, he tells me he had nothing to do with that either. Someone offered to pay him to take responsibility for it in television interview, he says, so he did that for the money and for the laws. He got a kick from the attention he tells me.

At the time, yeah, the attention is the wrong word that we actually, of course, were some

very upset people.

“It was the first time I've heard Kivy Mackey acknowledge that his actions upset people.”

How does you feel about the very upset people? Then it was funny. Yes. But a lot of people upset don't write very little and then I was doing nothing. He was in a check room and I was taking people on and feeling them wet the bread to get

more of the action. He was egging people on, he says.

But not doing it himself.

Did you enjoy the drama of it? Yes. Yeah. And what about the drama of the Sony executive and the bomb threats called onto his plane?

Was that drama you enjoyed? At the time, yes, now it's something I can definitely agree with. It's a kid. And I love really stupid things, right?

Oh, somebody's amazing building is throwing rocks into the dough so as for a lot of people

that's funny. And with a teenager, that's sort of wrong. Just regular teenage pranking, he says. Yeah, but calling in a bomb threat to a plane is not throwing eggs into the window. But the level of effort required, it's easier for a teenager to ground a plane with the

bomb threat and to throw eggs at a window and they're much less likely to get caught doing it.

“That's what you feel powerful that you can sit behind your computer and call so much.”

That's not sure, now I just make it feel stupid, yes, it's not fucking sad, it's not cool. Do you really believe that? I really believe that. It makes him feel stupid, he says.

Kivimaki wants me to think he's a changed man, and he seems to want me to believe contradictory things at the same time, that he's unusually clever, but as somehow found himself framed and imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, I'm not buying any of it. Aside from his chilling lack of empathy, nothing seems exceptional about Julius Kivimaki. So you're going up, you're not so interested in the internet anymore.

What are you going to do with your life when you get down? I don't need to go to sports travel or spend time with people in fun, interested in places where they're coming, in your bedroom and computer. Just go out and pick up, run out where I love them. And nearly two hours were done. I press the button to call the guard, for a minute or so,

I stand awkwardly opposite Kivimaki, separated by the perspective screen with nothing left to say, then the guard arrives and his sports salmon me away. Yeah, I mean, do you have any immediate thoughts that I feel more convinced than ever

“that he did it? And I think I can understand when people say that he does not seem to feel”

any empathy, did not have very much emotion at all in his face, and he was staring at me and looking at me dead in the eyes throughout the entire thing. And he said a few things I found really chilling about how he just found it very difficult to feel anything for the victims because, you know, God, anybody who hears the bare bones of this story feels something for the victims regardless of whether or not they're involved.

And I also think he is brought into his own mythology. He wanted me to think he was incredibly clever and some kind of prodigy, but he just said so many things that didn't make sense, you know, if what he was saying was true, why would he be doing time for somebody else? It's all just quite ridiculous. He really, he, there was a blankness to him. Is he just a fool?

The laws are to be arrested by the Autobahn, the spy-en-lose, the spy-en-wook, the extra-dehaled or the mega-gahal.

Later, by the time, in the hand-click.

“Vastomo patients continue to be victimised.”

Copies of their files have been circulating online ever since they were first dumped on the

dark web in October 2020. Someone has even built a special search engine for browsing the database. Just type in someone's name and you can call up their therapy notes. Easy. Tina says this doesn't surprise her. Give him a kiss, not just one of a kind. People are really, really curious. People want to know what she actually talked about in the therapy sessions.

People are nosy. People like secrets. Yeah. After desperately searching on the dark web when the scandal first broke,

Mary Tully eventually got hold of her therapy notes from Vastomo.

She went to one of their clinics to pick up a hard copy. I went there to gather my papers. There was a security card. You know, checking people's ideas, handing them out. Which I found very, very ironic. Like, okay, now you care to check people's ideas.

So I got my papers and I sat down in the lobby.

“Mary, remember, I tore the envelope open.”

When she read what her therapist had written about her, the notes ransom man had stolen her heart fell. But it wasn't for the reason she was expecting. I was very heartbroken about how my therapist had written about me. For example, he writes, "The patient is mostly angry, impulsive, bitter, you are hurt."

I was hurt. It made me feel sorry for the person I had been. Tommy chose to turn his experience into stand-up comedy. And Mary Tully decided to write a book. "Translate the title into English for me." So the title of the book is "Quake Isartierta".

“Something along to the lives of everyone and gets dinner.”

Mary Tully received supportive messages from other victims, as well as national coverage, but not just that. There are the people, especially on TikTok, who have called me crazy, in that case a lunatic or whatever. People even called me a whore. "Initially I just deleted the account."

If you search for Julius Kivimaki on TikTok, you'll find fan videos. His appeal is still ongoing. In September, the suspect questioned in Estonia was named as Daniel Newhart, an American citizen. He's been charged with aiding Kivimaki in the extortion attempt, but he's not in custody. His court date has yet to be set. He denies the charges.

At the time of recording Kivimaki is out of prison, while the court of appeal considers his case, he's been packed coughing wine in the street. Since the Vastamo extortion attempt, some hackers have become more audacious, more brazen, holding ever more sensitive data to ransom.

In 2023, 7 million people have their genetic code stolen when at home DNA testing service 23 and

me was hacked. In 2025, the names, pictures, and addresses of 8,000 preschool children were stolen by cybercriminals who hacked the database of a chain of nurseries in the UK. They published the records in batches of 10 a day. Anyone and any data is fair game for hackers now. In an age when so much of our personal data is stored digitally, and AI models are trained by

combing through our video calls, emails, and status updates, it seems naive to assume that anything online can be kept fully private. And yet, we can't stop living our lives online. It's how we connect with schools, public services, health care providers, and the rest of the world. It's where we seek validation, reassurance, and advice. It's where we construct our identities. We can't stop ourselves from uploading our most sensitive data.

Of all the things I asked Julius Kivimaki about, it was this that got him most animated.

Anything you type in that computer is at home could be?

So imagine how it will get hacked. Somebody sets out everybody's iPhone maps. Once they are everything, there's going to be everybody's photos, everybody's best messaging history, everybody's writing notes, diary entries, emails. So many of our worst secrets, I mean worst or, but things we might really really want to not share with the entire world. The elixist on my, the elixist and the database of some company used.

So, is the problem that we just still have this kind of analog,

“idea of analog expectations of privacy, and we're living in this digital world?”

I don't know. You're probably the only one I believe in this Brexit, but I've ever had. I don't know how you're really going to get there. The Vastamo hack and all the hacks that have happened since are not going to make us go back to face-to-face communication or pen and paper, that chip has sailed. So where does that leave us? I want to know what Henrik, the tech journalist, thinks.

Your secrets are never fully safe online, but people still want to

want to share their secrets online, don't they? Can you understand why? The other option is that you would just be totally silent, never say anything to anybody, and that's not the unit's light. But isn't there a sort of critical mass that if everybody's secret to out there, then nobody has anything to be ashamed of, because everybody's most personal details are out there.

Could there be something liberating about everybody's secrets being out in the open?

“Yes, I think so too, and that's what happens at the new disk app.”

So I endorse the idea, yes.

This was case scenario that your all your secrets could be out there. You've survived that. Yeah, sometimes the worst imagination, worst and the worst reality. Yeah. So in that case it's more like, okay, I still am going on and I have my life. Maybe this is my counter strike to this criminal.

Yes, saying that you didn't get me. Yes, I'm stronger than you, in a way, stronger, in a human way, in a human way, in an empathetic way, an empathy is, it's the strongest power in the world. Rants and man is written and presented by me, Jenny Cleeman. The producer is Sam Peach.

The executive producer is Georgia Cat. The story consultant is Annie Brown and the development producer is Emma Shaw. The commissioner is Dan Klok and the commissioning executive is Tracy Williams. Sound design by Sam Peach. The production manager is Debbie Woodell.

Music including our theme music is by Echo Collective. It's composed, performed and produced by Neil Leiter and Margaret Hermont. And it's recorded, mixed and produced by Fabienne Lassill. It's a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4. we hope you enjoyed this series from intrigue.

If you haven't already, why not listen to a previous series from this podcast, such as Word of God? Ben Lewis unravels the tangle story of a Christian billionaire family. stolen relics, fake treasures, and the scholar turned sleuth who exposed the scandal of biblical proportions.

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