A federal grand jury has charged eight men behind two of the largest illegal streaming operations in the US.
Illegal streaming sites Jetflicks and iStreamitAll were two subscription-based streaming sites. Thousands of movies and TV shows were available for subscribers to watch.
Earlier this week, the DoJ disclosed that eight individuals were indicted in a grand jury trial on Tuesday. The indictment says the men were running “two of the largest unauthorized streaming services in the United States.”
The charges in the case include conspiracy, criminal copyright infringement, and money laundering, with eight different individuals charged.
The operators are accused of running an unlicensed subscription-based service including live broadcast IPTV services. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) asked the Department of Justice to criminally prosecute these pirate streaming services. The names of these services were handed off to DoJ officials and this case is part of those efforts.
The indictment lists the following men as defendants in the case: Kristopher Lee Dallmann, 36; Darryl Julius Polo, aka djppimp, 36; Douglas M. Courson, 59; Felipe Garcia, 37; Jared Edward Jaurequi, aka Jared Edwards, 38; Peter H. Huber, 61; Yoany Vaillant, aka Yoany Vaillant Fajardo, 38; and Luis Angel Villarino, 40.
The DoJ’s announcement says these men reproduced thousands of copyright television shows without authorization.
One of the defendants left Jetflicks to create a rival streaming service, iStreamItAll. Darryl Polo was also charged with two counts of criminal copyright infringement by distribution and four counts of money laundering.
Much of the content the services featured — over 115,849 television episodes and 10,511 movies — came from other pirate sources. The indictment cites The Pirate Bay, RARBG and Usenet, and Torrentz as sources for the pirated content. Torrentz shut down in 2016 and was only a search engine with no direct links to infringing content.
iStreamItAll boasted that it had more content than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime combined.
These unlicensed services often sell modified hardware for accessing the illegal content. Thus they generate money from a subscription service tied to a hardware box. The difference is the content streamed to the box is unlicensed and obtained from already illegal sources.