Filesharing Admin Arrested for Selling User Database

Italian police have arrested the 49-old operator of a handful of file-sharing sites that were previously shut down. The man, known online under the pseudonym “Tex Willer”, allegedly made over half a million euros profit from the sites. Besides copyright infringement, tax evasion, forgery and fraud, he is also accused of selling the email addresses of 300,000 users.

http://i.imgur.com/abpuF.jpg

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Last November, Italian police (Guardia di Finanza) shut down a prominent network of five filesharing sites including ItalianShare.net.

Together the sites had more than 300,000 users and carried 31,402 links to movies, music, TV shows, software and games indexed on BitTorrent, cyberlockers and eDonkey networks.

This week the Italian fiscal police concluded their investigation into the 49-year-old operator of the sites, known online under the pseudonym “Tex Willer.” The operator was arrested and is suspected of facilitating copyright infringement and several related crimes.

In addition, five others have been charged with multiple offenses including tax fraud and counterfeiting.

According to the authorities, Willer also earned 37,000 euros by making the site’s user database available to advertisers. Emails and IP-addresses were sold without permission of the site’s members, which is a violation of privacy law.

The operator is also suspected of creating fake invoices worth 100,000 euros, and failing to pay 83,000 euros in taxes. In total, Willer made a profit of 580,000 euros since he began his activities in 2007.

The authorities claim that the value of the copyrighted works that were made available amounts to 32 million euros. For these copyright infringements Willer is facing hefty fines.

Enzo Mazza, president of Italian anti-piracy group FIMI, told TorrentFreak that this “is a very important case.”

“For the first time the Fiscal police did a very sophisticated analysis of the economics behind an infringing site using the standard procedure they are using for the money laundering investigation. We applaud the investigation of the fiscal police and the action taken by the public prosecutor from Salerno,” Mazza says.

While the sites have been shutdown, FIMI says an investigation into the advertisers who collaborated with Willer is ongoing.

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Source: AnonymZ

Ah, for a second I thought this might have something to do with the HDBits leak.

fake invoices worth over 100000 euros!! And then that with a profit margin afterwards. I guess it serves him right to be served with some hefty fines.

Not only that but this is something else I don't like:

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.....making the site’s user database available to advertisers...

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If that isn't a blatant breach of privacy, then I don't know what is. Serves the guy right to be given a hefty fine then. Maybe even a charge of breach of privacy issue if one of such kind exists in Italy for internet privacy breaches.

So he broke copyright infringement laws, privacy laws, tax evasion laws, and profited off torrenting. Pretty remarkable and it's a surprise he wasn't caught earlier.

I wonder how many other p2p sites are doing the same... but just not yet caught

There's probably a few others out there saebr 'ol buddy. I am fairly certain that there's more than one. There is one similar story that does stand out and you'll have to forgive me for my lack of memory here at this point but there were a couple of guys that marketed their sites as having some really fast download speeds and all it would cost the user to open up an account is $1. Seriously. That was it. JUst $1. In the end it was discovered that the site's admins who I think may have been from Eastern Europe, had actually had all their users download from open bittorrent sites like ISOhunt, TPB, and a few others. I think they were also prosecuted because they gathered all their loot, hid it from the government, and I don't know what happened after that. All I recall in the news at the time of having read this is that these guys were driving some kind of expensive cars but were prosecuted for some fraud related charges related to their online activities. Bummer for them, eh??

Sealy 'ol mate of mine, true true! All that hard work scheming and deceiving and what have they got to show for? Does hard work every pay off these days!? (mirror mirror)