A hacker responsible for maintaining an IPTV service has been sentenced by the Swedish courts. The young man is accused of having collected more than 265,000 euros by selling more than 3,000 subscriptions to Internet users. He also accumulated more than 600,000 euros in Bitcoin.
The Rights Alliance, a Swedish association for the fight against piracy, has just won another victory against pirates, report our colleagues from TorrentFreak. As it explains on its website, the group is responsible for “collect digital evidence” and throw “legal proceedings”.
The organization was hired by production companies SF Studios and Nordisk Film in September 2019 to stem the piracy of around twenty films. Quickly, the group realized that an IPTV service called MacIPTV illegally allowed its subscribers to watch 24 films from the Swedish companies mentioned above.
Read also: France adopts a new law against piracy, goodbye IPTV sites?
An IPTV hacker earned 18 bitcoins in 13 months
Alerted by the Rights Alliance, the police quickly tracked down the hacker behind the service. After an investigation, a 21-year-old man was arrested at his home in early 2021. According to law enforcement in Sweden, the individual provided more than 3,000 IPTV subscriptions to customers in the space of 13 months.
In exchange for these subscriptions to MacIPTV, the young pirate earned more than 265,000 euros. Customers deposited the money through their PayPal account or made Bitcoin payments via the blockchain. During the search of the home, the police officers also found a digital wallet containing 18 bitcoins, or 670,000 euros given the price of bitcoin. After the arrest, the digital currencies disappeared from the wallet. An accomplice obviously recovered the loot before the authorities demanded the access keys from his accomplice.
During his trial in the Stockholm Patent and Market Court, the young man denied being the instigator of MacIPTV. He claims not to be the mastermind of the operation. Contacted by an individual on Telegram, he had been hired to maintain the service. He admits, however, that he received payments from customers. Finally, he assures that he never became aware of the illegal nature of his actions.
The court condemned him for copyright infringement. He gets 140 hours of community service. Above all, the man must pay 200,000 euros in damages to the injured production companies. A few weeks earlier, a seller of Swedish IPTV boxes was also ordered to pay 145,000 euros in damages to production companies.
Source: TorrentFreak
