Zeekill: from teenage cyber thug to Europe’s Most Wanted

“We were able to prove that this anonymous person posting on the forum was Kivimäki. It was unbelievable but it shows that you have to use every measure you know and try those you don’t,” said Det Leponen.

In the end the judges delivered their verdict finding him guilty of all counts.

According to the court, Kivimäki was guilty of more than 30,000 crimes – one for each victim. He was charged with aggravated data breach, attempted aggravated blackmail, 9,231 aggravated dissemination of information infringing private life, 20,745 attempted aggravated blackmail and 20 aggravated blackmail.

He was sentenced to six years and three months in prison out of a maximum seven years, but he is likely to serve only half because of time already served and the Finnish justice system.

For victims like Tiina, this is nowhere near long enough.

“So many people were affected by this in so many ways – 33,000 people is a lot of victims and it’s affected our health, and some have been targeted with financial scams as well using the stolen data too,” she says.

Meanwhile she and the other victims are waiting to see if there is any compensation from the case.

Kivimäki has agreed in principle to settle out of court with one group of victims, but others are planning civil cases against either him or Vastaamo itself.

The psychotherapy company is now defunct and its founder has been given a suspended prison sentence for failing to protect patient data. Kivimäki has not told police how much money he has in bitcoin and claims to have forgotten his digital wallet details.

Ms Raisko hopes that the state might be able to step in but says it could take many more months if not years to go through each individual case to assess how much harm was caused.

There are even calls to change the law to help deal with future mass hack cases like this.

“This really is historical in Finland because our system is not ready for this amount of victims. The Vastaamo hack has showed us that we have to have to be prepared for these large cases so I hope there’s a change. This is not going to end here,” she says.