A Briton was sentenced to 30 months in prison, guilty of reselling android box pirated, in stores and online. A small business that brought him more than 2.6 million euros.
In the space of a few years, Halton Powell has managed to make the Droidsticks brand (Android boxes) and its complementary package Kodi essential IPTV in the United Kingdom. It must be said that the boxes sold included the dream paraphernalia of content lovers: pay TV channels and streaming services by the hundreds.
DroidSticks, a business that worked (largely) thanks to eBay
Halto Powell started its activity in November 2013, at the time under the name AndroidSticks, which earned it some intellectual property concerns the following year. The company was then renamed DroidSticks, its final name. The one who describes himself as an electronics technician worked through a small physical store.
But he began to sell more and more of his boxes online, via the eBay e-commerce platform. In itself, the sale of Android IPTV boxes is not illegal. But the exploitation that was made of it (by the contents) tipped the process over to the dark side of force, and therefore into illegality.
It is also the company eBay, concerned about the increase in sales of illegal preconfigured boxes, which was at the origin of a police investigation, launched in 2015. A month after the start of the investigations, an investigator infiltrated picked up a copy of the famous case from Halton Powell’s shop in Chingford, east London. This is where the police understood what the British seller was doing.
Powell Tried to Cover Up Evidence… But He Was Eventually Convicted
Boxes stamped DroidSticks were sold with pre-installed Kodi software. Kodi is this small open source software that allows you to stream content without being restricted by licenses or an online application store. Until then, everything is fine, except that the box contained a pack, the Droidsticks Wizard, which made it possible to install a whole bunch of additional modules, then giving the possibility of accessing pirated services and paid channels.
In 2016, several searches helped the police to get their hands on 1,300 devices collected in a storage box, as well as 121 other models found in Powell’s shop directly. If the individual was conspicuous by his silence, the police eventually found the right answers by searching Mr. Powell’s bank account. It reported 24,515 devices sold on eBay alone, for a total turnover of £2.3 million.
And while he tried to hide the evidence and continue his business (by switching his user support forum to private mode), Powell was singled out for attempting to prosecute the fraud. Since then, the evidence has accumulated, and on November 11, 2022, the criminal ended up pleading guilty. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison (two years and six months behind bars).
If Sky, one of the main aggrieved broadcasters, welcomed the sentence and testified to the importance of the fight against ” this type of crime “, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS, or the Prosecutor in its British version) intends to initiate proceedings aimed at confiscating all of Powell’s available assets.
Source : TorrentFreak
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