Jan Vermeulen is the editor of MyBroadband, South Africa's largest tech news website.
His credentials include "The Great African IP address heist" series of articles that exposed the wanton theft of IP address space from AFRINIC's free pool by its employee #2. He also helped unpick how long-forgotten legacy IP address space belonging to the South African government and private companies had been stolen and sold off. His work was recognised in the investigative journalism categories at the Standard Bank Sikuvile Awards and the Vodacom Journalist of the Year Awards. (Credit to Ron Guilmette, whose detective-work was instrumental in cracking the case.)
He also worked with a group of skids calling themselves Anonymous ZA to expose the inner workings of Mirror Trading International, a Bitcoin-based scam that turned out to be South Africa's biggest pyramid scheme and one of the biggest crypto scams in the world.
He has a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Pretoria and has always had a love of writing. He worked as a software engineer for three years before reading about an emerging new class of the fourth estate calling themselves hacker/journalists. With dreams that he would be living out the 1995 cult film Hackers, he joined MyBroadband in 2010 as a junior journalist. The real work of journalism was a rude awakening, but he fell in love with it anyway. The rest is 14 years of history.
