With the rise of programmable set-top boxes, companies have sprung up all over the UK to fulfil demand, with millions of devices now in the hands of the public.

Directed by Norfolk man Glenn Burrows, Ooberstick Ltd was incorporated in February 2016 and was set up to sell relatively expensive devices containing a custom build of Kodi and various addons. TF was previously informed these boxes were shipped out only partly configured, with customers required to complete the final install themselves.

A second company, Oober Media Ltd, was incorporated by Burrows during October 2016. Together with Oobersticks, the businesses amassed thousands of customers.

However, on Tuesday 13 December 2016, Burrows and business associate Darren Wicks of Wiltshire were arrested. A source who requested anonymity told TF that around six officers and a Sky representative were present during the 7:20am raid.

Both men were released on police bail with Burrows informing TF that he believed his business was legal.

“I was running a successful business which was both VAT registered in the U.K. and with Worldpay as my payment merchant. For me to get both of those, those parties have to be sure that what I was doing was legal,” he said.

Several months later, however, the position changed. On September 7, 2017, at Norwich Crown Court, Burrows pleaded guilty to intentionally encouraging or assisting the commission of an offense, along with a money laundering offense. On May 17, 2018, at the same court, Darren Wicks pleaded guilty to intentionally encouraging or assisting the commission of an offense.

Last Friday, both appeared before Norwich Crown Court for sentencing.

33-year-old Burrows (right) was sentenced to 22 months in prison on two counts to run concurrently.

He was also made subject to a Serious Crime Prevention Order which prevents him from selling products online for five years. He’s now required to notify police of his online usernames and identities.

Wicks, 45, of Chippenham in Wiltshire, was sentenced to 20 months in prison, suspended for two years. He must also carry out 250 hours of unpaid work.

“I hope these sentences send a clear message that the use of illicit streaming devices to watch content without the copyright owner’s permission is illegal,” says Detective Sergeant Samantha Shevlin of the Norfolk and Suffolk Police Cyber Crime Unit.

“The sale of these boxes has a huge effect on the content owners, broadcasters and the wider public who will end up paying the price for others’ dishonesty. The message really is that simple – devices like this or using one at home to watch content you normally would pay for is breaking the law.”

A Proceeds of Crime Act hearing for Burrows will take place in due course. In the meantime, both of his companies have been resigned to history, with Ooberstick Ltd having been dissolved during January 2018 and Oober Media Ltd shut down in March 2018. Neither company ever filed any accounts.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Rampage is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(1)	Rampage	6.3 / trailer
2	(2)	Ready Player One	7.7 / trailer
3	(4)	Escape Plan 2: Hades	3.9 / trailer
4	(3)	Blockers	6.6 / trailer
5	(…)	Sanju	8.8 / trailer
6	(6)	Avengers: Infinity War (HDCam)	9.1 / trailer
7	(5)	A Quiet Place	7.8 / trailer
8	(…)	Ant-Man and the Wasp (Cam)	7.7 / trailer
9	(…)	Super Troopers 2	6.5 / trailer
10	(7)	Tomb Raider	6.6 / trailer

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

The makers of the films ‘Mechanic: Resurrection’ and ‘A Family Man’ are not new to filing copyright infringement lawsuits.

They previously went after alleged BitTorrent pirates, ordering them to pay significant settlement fees or face legal repercussions. This so-called “copyright troll” approach worked well, but in Hawaii, they have expanded their reach.

In a complaint filed in May at the US District Court of Hawaii, ME2 Productions and Headhunter accused local resident Taylor Wolf, who works at the Verizon-branded phone store Victra, of promoting Showbox and its infringing uses to a customer.

Showbox is a movie and TV-show streaming application that’s particularly popular among mobile Android users. The app is capable of streaming torrents and works on a wide variety of devices. The app can be used to pirate too, and that’s what the employee allegedly promoted.

This approach was already unique by itself, but in an amended complaint filed this week, the filmmakers go a step further.

Allegedly, other Victra employees encouraged Wolf to promote the Showbox app to drive up sales. This prompted the movie companies to add AKA Wireless and ABC Phones, which do business as Victra in Hawaii, according to the complaint.

“Upon information and belief, other employees of VICTRA informed First Defendant Wolf of Show Box and encouraged her to distribute and promote Show Box to customers in order to drive sales of telecommunication equipment, thus giving financial benefit to Second and Third Defendants,” the complaint reads.

This means that, in addition to suing the employee for contributory copyright infringement, the Victra store itself is also bing held vicariously liable for alleged copyright infringement.

“The Second and Third Defendants are vicariously liable for the contributory copyright infringement of First Defendant Wolf, as First Defendant Wolf was acting within the scope of her employment when she committed the wrongful conduct..,” the complaint reads.

The Victra defendants had the right and the power to directly control the activities of the employee and received a direct financial benefit from the infringing activities, the filmmakers allege.

It’s quite an unusual approach, to say the least.

While the complaint didn’t mention how Wolf was identified, it’s likely the filmmakers first went after the customer in a traditional BitTorrent lawsuit, who then informed them about the Showbox recommendation.

After the movie studios found out that other employees were involved, the phone store was added to the lawsuit as well. That, conveniently, increases the chance for the movie studios to recoup their damages…

—
A copy of the amended complaint is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Many moons ago, people started file-sharing sites for the simple purpose of sharing files with friends and other like-minded people. By volume, it was relatively rare for commercial interests to come first.

While a considerable number of smaller platforms will still fiercely protest their non-profit status if challenged, in 2018 there can be little doubt that generating revenue is the motivation behind the majority of public sites. The prevalence of ads and affiliate schemes is a testament to that.

Of course, sites don’t always start out this way. Many private torrent trackers, for example, were created with the intention of providing free, no-strings content for all. Some still achieve that today but the rising costs of running a site (including servers for hosting, proxying, seeding etc) can’t be ignored, not least since the rich benefactors of yesterday have mostly moved on.

To this end, most sites these days generate money in a number of visible ways, from ever-present ads and product affiliate schemes to ‘donation’ models that are little more than disguised subscriptions. Others accept donations in the traditional sense, with a begging bowl handed round each time a server bill is due.

But what happens when the ends no longer meet? The users of two formerly ‘free’ sites have been finding out recently. In a pair of monster discussion threads on Reddit (1,2), users of pirate anime site ‘Kissanime’ complain that they’ve been completely banned from the video platform.

Their unforgivable crime? Ad-blocking.

Users say that all they did was visit the site with Adblock Plus or uBlock Origin enabled in their browser and the next thing they were given a ban. We jumped aboard and found ourselves greeted by the notice creating all the fuss.

No ad-blocking allowed…

It’s not as if users weren’t warned though. A notice published on the site’s main page informs members that running any kind of browser addon could mean ejection from video platform.

“Using any extensions/plugins on KissAnime could lead to errors/suspension,” it reads.

Nevertheless, plenty of people appear to have ignored the advice and have suffered the consequences as a result. For their part, the operators of the site seem completely unrepentant.

“There is no way to lift the ban at the moment, if you got banned, please disable those adblockers on kissanime, never turn it on kissanime again and wait. Or you could use other anime sites,” an admin announced on Discord.

The situation is an interesting one. Like most pirate sites, KissAnime has costs that have to be met by those visiting the site. Short of asking for a “donation”, these costs are currently met by advertising revenue. However, many users don’t want to be bombarded by advertising so they block the ads.

This means that all adblocking users become freeloaders and therefore a drain on the site. As far as the site’s health goes, there’s literally no point in them being there so they’re best removed from the community. It’s an ironic situation best appreciated by the anime producers themselves who are also trying to make a living.

That being said, not all people block ads out of malice towards the site. Some users complain about porn ads corrupting their experience, so in response they block them all. Being selective is too laborious, they say.

For the site, a solution could be to remove the surprise porn ads. However, a source who asked to stay anonymous told TF that these sometimes offensive ads can be quite lucrative, hence the desire for them to stay visible.

But while one site decides to kick all of its adblocking users out for being a drain on resources, another has taken an even more radical approach to its making available of other people’s content.

FreeTutorials.us is a site that offers premium tutorials and other learning materials without permission from copyright holders. As its name suggests, it originally offered content for free.

Earlier this year, FreeTutorials.us made the headlines after being targeted in the courts by online learning platform Udemy, which took exception to its content appearing on the site for nothing.

In a subsequent interview with TF, the pirate site’s operator explained the motivation behind FreeTutorials (FTU) and affiliated site FreeCoursesOnline (FCO).

“We have been through that phase of life when we didn’t have enough money to buy books and get tuition or even apply for a good course that we always wanted to have, so FTU & FCO are just our vision to provide Free Education For Everyone,” he explained.

While having the ability to learn for free is appreciated by millions the world over, for users of FreeTutorials the dream is now over. Last month and with little fanfare, free download buttons were replaced with something else entirely.

Subscribe for free stuff

There’s little doubt that the prices being charged are much lower than those officially available, something which probably prompted FreeTutorials to change its tagline to the current ‘Affordable Education For Everyone’.

On this basis alone they’re likely to retain visitors. Indeed, a look at their traffic stats for the past few weeks suggests that visitor numbers have remained stable. If this translates to sales, no one should expect ‘free tutorials’ to return. Like free content, few people are turning down ‘free’ money.

FreeTutorials’ email addresses bounce so we can’t ask them why they shifted over to the pay model. However, one doesn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that in one way or another, a desire to make money is at the root of the change. Whether that’s simply to pay for hosting costs or to help cover living expenses is unknown and probably irrelevant.

The important thing is that whether it’s an enforced advertising model, donations, or a flat-out desire to charge money, pirate sites face similar commercial difficulties to those experienced by their legal counterparts. Everything costs money and needs to be paid for, and if the books don’t balance, that’s the end of the show.

Despite their differences, perhaps they’re quite similar after all.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

For the past several years, Twitter has been the platform most used by Kim Dotcom to get his messages out to the public.

Whenever there’s been a development in his long-running case, Twitter is usually the first place to find up-to-date information.

With his larger-than-life persona, Kim has developed a huge following. He currently has more than 732,000 followers on his official account, something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by those looking to generate profit from his significant profile.

Kim’s tweets are regularly piggybacked by criminals seeking to trick the public into handing over cash. Exploiting a weakness in the way Twitter displays tweets and replies, they’re able to use fake accounts that look like his in order to promote their agenda.

It begins with the real Kim but goes somewhere dark

As the image above shows, a genuine Tweet by Kim to his followers is followed by others which claim to be him giving away cryptocurrency. Upon closer inspection, however, it’s clear that while the names and images match, the underlying Twitter usernames are quite different.

This particular scam leads to a Tumblr blog which has Kim’s name in the URL. For added credibility, it also adds a ‘Medium’ logo at the top and a faked “13.2K” claps at the bottom. In the middle, the offer is made clear.

“It has been an exciting past year. Thanks to your support, I am giving away 10,000 Ethereum!” the fake Kim Dotcom writes.

“To identify your address, please send .5-10 ETH to the payment address and I will immediately send you 5-100 ETH back to the address you sent it from. If you are late, your ETH will be instantly returned.

“I know it has been a rough past few months for Cryptocurrency hodlers, but maybe this gift will cheer you up!”

Needless to say, the offer of free cryptocurrency is completely fake, with the scam designed to part Kim Dotcom fans from their money. For added effect, the blog post has plenty of comments (all fake of course) which falsely claim that ETH has been sent to “Kim’s account” and he has been kind enough to send plenty back for free.

With some fake users claiming to have received as much as 55 ETH from Kim (1 ETH is currently around $460.00) the temptation must be high to get involved. Rest (un)assured, there’s only one person getting rich from this scam.

Unfortunately, several groups have jumped aboard the gravy train. As can be seen from the image below, scammers are jumping on Kim’s recent tweets to promote their criminal activity in the hope that people hand over their hard-earned cash.

Same scam, different presentation

These attempted scams aren’t new and have been going on for some time now. However, on the back of the news this week that Kim’s latest effort to avoid extradition to the United States has failed, the scammers are jumping onto Kim’s posts and exposing thousands more visitors to fraud on a larger scale.

Thankfully, there’s some advice from the genuine Kim Dotcom on how to easily avoid online criminals exploiting his name.

“Unfortunately there are many fake Kim Dotcom accounts on Twitter offering free gifts and free crypto. Don’t fall for those scams. The only real Kim Dotcom account on Twitter is the one with the blue verification tick next to my name,” he previously explained.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.