Barrow continued to run his fraudulent business even after police visited his house.<\/p>\n
He was given a cease and desist notice and details about previous court cases which had seen defendants receiving custodial sentences. <\/p>\n
Barrow also had his account suspended by Facebook on the grounds he was violating intellectual property rules.<\/p>\n
When officers returned to his property they found he had a “football-themed bar” at the rear of the property where potential customers could see the illegal streaming for themselves.<\/p>\n
Ari Alibhai, prosecuting on behalf of the Premier League, told the court that for more than four year the defendant provided customers with apps and modified Amazon Fire TV Sticks.<\/p>\n
An Amazon Fire Stick is a device that plugs into TVs and gives the viewer options to watch programmes from legitimate services including the BBC iPlayer and Netflix.<\/p>\n
This allowed them to unlawfully access content from broadcasters such as Sky Sport, TNT Sport, and BT Sport along with other content, live events including big boxing matches, and a library of more than 18,000 films.<\/p>\n
Alibhai said on the defendant’s own account he had more than 1,800 customers and was providing a “subscription and hardware” package at about \u00a3120 a year, a fraction of what the legitimate broadcasters were charging.<\/p>\n
The court heard that Barrow only accepted new customers on recommendation from existing customers and insisted on the use of full names to avoid the operation being, as he put it, “infiltrated by Sky agents”.<\/p>\n
Payments were made via PayPal or into the defendant’s bank account, and he encouraged customers to disguise the nature of the transfers by referencing them as being for classic or retro football kits.<\/p>\n
The court heard Barrow also had a “significant degree of technical knowledge” and was able to advise customers on how they could take steps to get around the techniques used by the broadcasters to counteract the illegal streaming of their content. <\/p>\n
The prosecutor said Barrow’s activities came to the attention of South Wales Police in 2021 following reports to the CrimeStoppers charity. <\/p>\n
Officers visited his home in Pembrokeshire to advise him that the authorities were aware of what he was doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barrow continued to run his fraudulent business even after police visited his house. He was given a cease…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-618529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}