Eight People Charged For Running Largest Illegal Streaming Services

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People Running Largest Illegal Streaming Services Get Charged

When you mess with these corporations and their money, it’s only a matter of time before you get caught.

Eight people have been charged with conspiring to violate federal criminal copyright law, which resulted in the loss of millions of dollars by television program and film copyright owners.

According to reports from Variety, Kristopher Lee Dallmann, Darryl Julius Polo, Douglas M. Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Edward Jaurequi, Peter H. Huber, Yoany Vaillant, and Luis Angel Villarino were all indicted by a federal grand jury for running Jetflicks (get it?), an online subscription streaming service based in Las Vegas.

Jetflicks permitted users to illegally stream and download copyrighted TV shows by using computer code to search and download programs from global pirate sites such as the Pirate Bay and Torrentz.

Basically, people were getting TV shows for free instead of paying for Netflix, Hulu, etc.

One of the defendants, Darryl Polo, was supposedly a member of the Jetflicks computer programming team before he eventually left and created an equally illegal competing service, iStreamItAll. Both sites were available online and on numerous systems including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, video game consoles, and digital media players allegedly reproducing tens of thousands of copyrighted television programs without authorization.

Jetflicks offered over 183,200 different TV shows while its competition had approximately 120,000 different titles.

Dallman and Polo were both additionally charged with two counts of criminal copyright by public performance, four counts of money laundering along with two counts of criminal copyright infringement by reproduction or distribution.

It’s not too surprising that people are still illegally downloading content, but it still raises the question: Doesn’t everyone have someone else’s Netflix login at this point?