A UK man who ran an operation offering illegal access to Premier League football has been jailed for 16 months.
Mr Paul Faulkner appeared in front of Liverpool Crown Court on Tuesday 6 July after pleading guilty to multiple copyright and fraud offences, including accessing pirate content for his own use. Mr Faulkner was the operator of subscription-based IPTV service TV Solutions, a pirate streaming service that offered illegal access to sports and entertainment broadcast content, including live Premier League matches and Sky channels.
He pleaded guilty to both the unlawful supply of content and his own use of the service to view content he should have been paying to watch. The judge recognised that Faulkner’s use of the unauthorised service was a distinct crime in itself. This was reflected in him receiving a separate sentence of four months’ imprisonment for using the service.
Despite the defendant selling access to his service on social media platforms as a secondary source of income, the judge made it clear this case was a sophisticated fraud carried out over a significant period of time, made more serious by the involvement of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
The Premier League worked with FACT to track down the offender and brought legal action against him in a private prosecution which Ari Alibhai of counsel was instructed in.
See here for the formal Premier League press release.
Ari Alibhai