Occam's Razor suggests it is far more likely that this is just a crackhead doing crackhead things. If your goal was to spread it far and wide why would you think a single copy left in the care of a computer shop was a likely way to accomplish that? I know plenty of places that simply wiped it clean and sold it to re-cover their fees after making whatever notification to the original owner the law required. It's roughly akin to leaving a file cabinet of damaging documents in a storage unit and then not paying the fee. You're putting an awful lot of faith in the people that buy the contents at auction to read any of it, rather than sending it straight to the dump once they realize there is not cash in it.
Which is exactly why I consider it nothing short of a miracle that the owner did go through the files and also had the foresight to make an extra copy in case the FBI tried to bury it, which they did.
Occam's Razor suggests it is far more likely that this is just a crackhead doing crackhead things. If your goal was to spread it far and wide why would you think a single copy left in the care of a computer shop was a likely way to accomplish that? I know plenty of places that simply wiped it clean and sold it to re-cover their fees after making whatever notification to the original owner the law required. It's roughly akin to leaving a file cabinet of damaging documents in a storage unit and then not paying the fee. You're putting an awful lot of faith in the people that buy the contents at auction to read any of it, rather than sending it straight to the dump once they realize there is not cash in it.
Which is exactly why I consider it nothing short of a miracle that the owner did go through the files and also had the foresight to make an extra copy in case the FBI tried to bury it, which they did.