Law enforcement authorities from 18 different countries, supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Europol and Eurojust, managed to arrest several individuals suspected of running an international illegal movie piracy ring.
More commonly known as the 'Sparks Group', the people have been facilitating illegal distribution of blockbuster titles for years.
According to Europol, the authorities took down more than 60 servers managed by the Sparks Group across a number of countries, including Canada, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, South Korea, and more.
The pirate group Sparks Group used these servers to illegally store and disseminate copyrighted content to its members.
Homeland Security’s Peter Fitzhugh, said:
The authorities said that the group is already under investigation since September 2016.
In order to get their hands on the unreleased titles, the members of the group purportedly posed as DVD and Blu-Ray retailers to trick wholesale distributors into giving them the movies way before their official release dates.
Umar Ahmad and George Bridi were the two who arranged the discs to be picked up, mailed, or delivered from their distributors in Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey. Other members of the group, including Jonatan Correa, were the people who received the discs.
While the pirates promised to honor the release dates, they ultimately stripped the content of any copyright protections, and distributed them on various streaming services and torrent sites on the web.
"Once they received the products, the members of the group used special software to crack the copyright protections to then reproduce and encode the content in high-definition. The content was then disseminated and reproduced on streaming platforms, peer-to-peer and torrent networks from their platforms," wrote Europol on its press release.
The three are charged with copyright infringement conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
Bridi who is a citizen of the United Kingdom, and arrested in Cyprus based on Interpol's Red Notice, is also charged with wire fraud conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. He also faces conspiracy to transport stolen property interstate, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
Audrey Strauss, the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, as quoted on a press release by the Department of Justice, said that:
"The group allegedly circumvented copyright protections on nearly every movie released by major production studios, as well as television shows, and distributed them by way of a worldwide network of servers."
"Thanks to the efforts of HSI, the Postal Inspection Service, Eurojust, Europol, and our law enforcement partners in 18 countries on three continents, key members of this group are in custody, and the servers that were the pipeline for wholesale theft of intellectual property are now out of service.”
The Department of Justice said that the case is being prosecuted by the Office’s Violent and Organized Crime Unit, with Assistant United States Attorneys Andrew K. Chan, Mollie Bracewell, and Christy Slavik are in charge of the prosecution.
At this time. the charges contained in the Indictments are merely accusations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
Countries involved in this operation, include: Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Republic of Korea, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
Previously, The European Commission reported that the number of ads placed on pirate sites is trending down.
After launching a campaign to introduce a voluntary anti-piracy agreement for advertisements for major EU brands, the union saw the number of ads served per visit on pirate websites to drop by 12%.
