On March 13, 2023, two childhood friends were sentenced by French justice to prison for having founded the Zone-Téléchargement piracy site in 2012. The last stage of a 2-year investigation that put an end to this activity very lucrative for the duo.
This is the end point of a two-year hunt. Childhood friends and co-founders of the French illegal download site Zone-Téléchargement, Thibault Ferreira and Wilfrid Duval were sentenced by the Toulouse Criminal Court to 18 months in prison on March 13, 2023.
A hearing reported by the local investigation site Mediacities Toulouse. Founded in 2012, the site for sharing pirated cultural content had become the 11th most visited site in France, according to the online media. An activity that had made its co-founders rich.
Up to 11,000 downloads per day
Let’s go back seven years. In 2016, four years after the creation of the site, illegal sharing is in full swing in France. Sales of DVDs and CDs are collapsing more and more in the face of the digitization of consumers’ daily lives, turning massively towards the piracy of these cultural works in the absence of similar legal offers.
During this period, the Zone-Téléchargement site then generated 3.7 million connections per month and 11,000 downloads per day, according to the daily The Parisian. But a threat nevertheless weighs on the site: in 2014 two associations for the defense of rights holders (Sacem and Alpa) launched a legal complaint.
For two years, the gendarmerie, the center for the fight against digital crime and the regional police intervention group investigate the bank accounts of the illegal sharing site, highlighting 1.5 million euros in earnings per year via offshore accounts in Malta, Cyprus and Belize, details Mediacities Toulouse.
Luxury living and pretrial detention
Thibault Ferreira and Wilfrid Duval will finally be arrested in November 2016 in their sumptuous properties in Andorra, seized by the courts with their luxury cars and 450,000 euros.
They are then charged with offenses related to intellectual property, money laundering and for belonging to an organized criminal group. After a few months in prison, they were finally released on parole with an electronic bracelet in March 2017, until their trial this year. They were eventually sentenced to 18 months in prison, including 12 months suspended.
Despite their conviction, the two childhood friends have already served their sentence in pre-trial detention and will not return to prison. On the other hand, they could appeal their judgment, their lawyer Simon Cohen believing that they are only responsible for having relayed illegal content without hosting it themselves.
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