There are a father and his son behind the latest attempt at blackmail against the family of the former F1 world champion, Michael Schumacher, who was seriously injured in a skiing accident in 2013. This was reported by the German Prosecutor’s Office in Wuppertal, which is investigating the case. Previously, the prosecutor’s office had only announced that it was investigating “a case of blackmail against a celebrity”. Chief prosecutor Wolf-Tilman Baumert has now said that several arrest warrants have been executed in connection with the charges, as reported Der Spiegel. According to the prosecution, two men aged 53 and 30 from Wuppertal tried to blackmail Schumacher’s family. The two claimed to be in possession of files whose publication would not be in the family’s interests. In exchange they would have asked for a sum of millions, otherwise the data would have been published on the Darknet.
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the accusations
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According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the alleged perpetrators of the blackmail attempt sent individual files to the Schumacher family to underline the seriousness of their threat. The technical traceability of these files then led to suspicion of the father and his son. The two main suspects were arrested on June 19 in the parking lot of a supermarket in Gross-Gerau, Hesse, and are currently in custody. “If convicted, they risk a fine or prison sentence of up to five years,” Wuppertal’s chief prosecutor said. This is not the first time the Schumacher family has been targeted by criminals. In 2017, the Reutlingen District Court sentenced a 25-year-old to a 21-month suspended sentence for attempted blackmail. The man had asked Schumacher’s wife for 900,000 euros, under the threat that something might happen to her children. Last month, Schumacher’s family won a legal action against a magazine publisher who published an AI-generated interview with the former champion.
