There were five defendants who were found guilty by a federal jury in Las Vegas of operating one of the largest unlawful streaming services in the country.
Once upon a time, the website of the illicit streaming service Jetflicks advertised that users could view virtually any television episode or movie “Anytime. Anywhere.” At this time, the five individuals who were responsible for the illegal streaming service are facing significant jail time.
Kristopher Dallman, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Jaurequi, and Peter Huber were found guilty of conspiracy to conduct criminal copyright infringement by a jury in a federal court in Las Vegas on Friday. The jury found all of them guilty of the charge. According to court documents and a news release issued by the United States Department of Justice, Dallmann was also found guilty of two counts of money laundering and three charges of misdemeanor criminal copyright infringement for his role as the leader of the Jetflicks enterprise.
Jetflicks used computer scripts and software to trawl the internet for illegal copies of movies and television series and posted hundreds of thousands of unlawful copies as far back as 2007 from torrent and Usenet sites. According to the Department of Justice, the defendants accumulated a library of bootleg movies and television series that was larger than the sum of the collections of streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime.
Through the payment of a monthly fee, users were able to visit the website on virtually any media streaming device that has a web browser. According to the initial indictment that was submitted to the Eastern District of Virginia in 2019, Jetflicks made the claim that it “offered more than 183,200 television episodes and had more than 37,000 subscribers.”
The leader of the group, Dallmann, together with his other conspirators “made millions of dollars streaming and distributing this catalog of stolen content,” as stated in the press release by the organization.
At one point in time, Jetflicks’ operators and workers were able to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars annually via the company’s subscription service. In a chat room on the internet, Dallman stated that his website had generated $750,000 in revenue in a single year, as stated in the indictment.
In the year 2012, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) took notice of Jetflicks and sent letters to the proprietors of the website requesting that they cease and desist their activities. A subscription for a period of six months was purchased by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in order to initiate its covert operation on the website, which took place four years later. In addition to recording many instances of unlawful uploads of episodes such as Shameless, Ray Donovan, The OA, and SyFy’s 12 Monkeys, undercover officers also documented charges for accessing these shows for illicit purposes. After that, the agents followed the trail of such charges until they reached the bank accounts of the accused, as stated in the court records.
There is currently no planned date for the sentence hearing. According to the Department of Justice, Dallman could be sentenced to a maximum of 48 years in prison, and the four defendants who are still on trial might each be sentenced to five years in prison.