The friendly-looking fellow in the photo is spending 5½ years in federal prison, plus a $30,000,000 fine.
This sentence brought an end to a YouTube channel with 819,000 subscribers, where he showcased an extravagant, dream lifestyle — luxury cars, lavish mansions, and lavish spending.
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Behind the story lies a fraud industry that is generating enormous sums of money even as you read this, built on a legitimate technology called IPTV.
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An IPTV service is what we know from providers like Cellcom TV. You pay for a TV package on top of your internet line and can watch television over your home internet connection instead of through cable or satellite.
A number of companies offer multiple IPTV services under a single subscription, so one package can include Apple TV, HBO, television channels from around the world, a VOD library, and more.
In contrast to legitimate IPTV services, it is also possible — through roundabout and illegal means — to purchase unauthorized IPTV subscriptions. These cost far less, yet offer a content library comparable to that of legal IPTV services.
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And this is where the big fraud comes in.
A virtual server acts as a paying subscriber to a legitimate IPTV service, at full price.
From there, the video stream is redistributed to a large number of sub-users, who pay their subscription fee to the original account holder rather than to the content companies themselves. The result: the media companies bear the cost of streaming enormous volumes of content to masses of users, yet receive subscription revenue from only the primary account holder — not from any of the end users.
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By 2019, when the pirate service was shut down, the fraudster had managed to earn approximately $34 million from around 100,000 subscribers.
Unlike the many fraudsters who continue this activity and rake in fortunes, he made the mistake of flaunting his wealth on his YouTube channel — which aroused the suspicion of tax authorities, who began investigating the source of the money and ultimately uncovered the scheme.