According to the American indictment, the 21-year-old Epiphaniou was known in cyberspace under the pseudonyms "charySQX" and "George Petrou". Authorities accuse him, according to Kathimerini, of database violations and electronic blackmail against American companies.
The relevant case file, cited by Kathimerini, states that the young hacker violated in October 2014 the database of the free online gaming platform Armor Games.
He then allegedly asked the site's chief technician to pay a ransom of $ 1.500 in bitcoin, in order not to publish the personal data of the users he had extracted. In the same report, he allegedly claimed to have access to data from 450.000 users.
The same sources report that his lawyers tried to slow down the extradition process by claiming that the young hacker suffers from Asperger syndrome.
They added that when everything that happened to him happened, he was only 15 years old and he could not grasp the gravity of his actions.
Self-taught in computers and without a high school diploma, Epifaniou grew up without his Cypriot father and dropped out of the penultimate class of the American Academy in Nicosia to help his Filipino mother, a supermarket clerk, with family expenses.
He was arrested in May 2017 as a suspect in a denial of service attack on the network of the telecommunications company Cablenet in Cyprus.
He was remanded in custody for several months and released on bail on bail but was soon re-arrested.
"If you send him to America, he will be all alone. He has no relatives there ", they said but they were not listened to and on July 17, his flight landed at the JFK airport in New York. Joshua Epifaniou became the first Cypriot citizen extradited from his country to the United States.
The young Cypriot is threatened with a sentence of 20 years in prison, if found guilty by an American court.