Two men were awaiting trial after their arrest in 2019. They were on trial for fraudulent trading, money laundering and copyright infringement for selling pirate IPTV boxes on Facebook. The sentences have fallen: they range from 21 months to two years.
In the United Kingdom, sell pirate IPTV boxes to watch sports without paying a subscription can take you to court. Two men have thus just been condemned to pass 21 and 24 months respectively behind bars for selling live access to film, sports and television channels through pirate boxes. Three weeks before the start of the biggest sporting event in the world, the high authorities of Commerce and Telecommunications seem to have coordinated to raid pirate IPTV boxes. Hacking pays off a lot. It is thus said that illegally watching Netflix and paid channels brings in 1 billion €/year for pirates.
The investigations which led to these exemplary sentences were initiated by the equivalent of the Chamber of Commerce of the county of Kent, in the south-east of the United Kingdom. The small businesses of the two convicts enabled them to reap the tidy sum of €691,000 in a year and a half in total. Although they have each pleaded guilty to copyright, fraud and money laundering charges, and have sought leniency from the court, it is indeed behind bars that they will spend the next years.
In Europe, selling illegal streaming subscriptions can land you in jail
English law allows copyright and TV rights holders to prosecute offenders. That is to say that pirate box suppliers, and even consumers, are liable not only to pay damages, but also to see themselves inflicting a prison sentence. While the European Commission refuses to sanction pirates directly, television channels and also the Premier League therefore have no qualms about prosecuting bad payers and having them imprisoned.
Investigators from the Kent Chamber of Commerce had no trouble tracking down the “thugs”, since all they had to do was consult Facebook. They were selling their pirate boxes on the Market Place, and customers had to pay by PayPal. The resellers thought, wrongly, that they were safe from any prosecution. Alas, one of them had declared his company under his own name. For the judge, who ruled on both cases at the same time, “these crimes are too serious to avoid prison sentences”.