The US authorities are satisfied because, finally, they are going to bring to trial those who are considered some of the biggest pirates in the country’s history. After evading justice for years and even seeing how their companions turned themselves in, it also seems that their time has come.
It is not difficult to imagine that the story of Kristopher Lee Dallmann and the other rebel pirates of the group of “the Las Vegas 8” could end up becoming a Hollywood film. Surely more than one screenwriter has some idea to ensure that their particular battle with justice ends in the cinema. For now, yes, the end remains to be seen, which will kick off in a trial planned for March of this year 2024. With that encounter with justice, a persecution of more than five years will have ended.
They are the ones who did not surrender
When they were accused of very serious crimes of piracy in 2019, only two of the eight accused by justice decided to plead guilty. They assessed the situation, the risks and the sentence they would receive if they turned themselves in and admitted their crimes, mainly encompassed around the idea of skipping copyright rights and profiting from it.
With this decision, Luis Ángel Villarino, who worked as a programmer for the IPTV pirate service Jetflicks, was sentenced to 366 days in prison. He was convicted of violating copyright, something that the court saw clearly in view of the fact that this platform had more than 180,000 episodes of television series illegally available. To try to go unnoticed, the website posed as an aviation service, although it hid inside that IPTV platform that became one of the most famous in the United States.
For his part, Darryl Julius Polo also admitted his guilt. His situation was worse, since not only had he also been a programmer for Jetflicks, but he had also founded what had positioned itself as the second pirate IPTV service in America: iStreamitAll. Possibly, his accumulated experience with his first job had led him to find a way to start a business on his own to profit at a much higher level. In his case, the sentence imposed by the court was to spend 57 months in jail, but he also had to pay a million dollars when he was accused of violating copyright and, in addition, for money laundering.
But although these two pirates did surrender and admitted their guilt, five others tried to prolong the moment of truth in which they would face a possible sentence. Both the aforementioned Kristopher Lee Dallmann, as well as Felipe García, Doublas M. Courson, Peter H. Huber, Jared Edward Jaurequi and Yoany Vaillant Fajardo, tried to escape justice. In the end, however, although they have delayed the moment for five years, they will soon be on trial and it seems that their verdicts will not be as kind as those received by their former colleagues.
Piracy leaders in the United States
Justice is satisfied for not only having stopped the existence of Jetflicks and iStreamitAll, but also because they will be able to show other pirates what happens when they play with fire. We have already mentioned the content that Jetflicks offered before, but what we have not said is that iStreamitAll was providing its clients with almost 11,000 movies and more than 118,000 episodes of series. The numbers were so huge that they exceeded what any legal streaming service could offer. That had led to the pirates behind the operation being considered some of the most important in North American history.
If the trial of the five pirates has been so delayed for some reason, it has been due to a series of circumstances and some methods of action on the part of the investigators that went a little outside the rules. Some defendants refused medical tests to check whether they used drugs, others suffered illegal searches and were even prevented from exercising their Fifth Amendment right. Evidence has also been provided of how FBI agents had caused psychological stress among the accused and how irregularities have occurred with the management of evidence.
The main problem of what lies ahead for pirates is the confirmed and gigantic amount of data and documents that the government has about them and their businesses. It is said that 175,000 printed documents have been submitted, including everything from reports to photographs, and that the volume of data amounts to a total of 423 GB.
In addition to that, bank records, receipts from commercial transactions, emails from six Google accounts used by the hackers, audio and video recordings, reports from the company servers they were using will also be used in the trial. OVH and even communications with clients. As if this were not enough, justice has also presented 18 TB of additional data with images of all types of devices that the pirates were using, such as IPTV decoders, and other elements that could work against them.
With this in mind, it is very clear that the March trial could turn out to be very high-profile. In part, it could be what allows justice to demonstrate why the pirates would do better to admit their guilt as the two companions of this group did. When the sentence is handed down we will know.
