There was a time when you had to pay to watch Internet porn \u2013 the sheer incredulity of it. These days, we expect to switch on the laptop and gain access to 140,000 housewives from Hull, not just Hilda splattered across the staples of your Razzle magazine.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the same with movies.<\/p>\n
Ditto TV shows.<\/p>\n
Yeah, Netflix does well, and you get access to Amazon Prime when you go for the \u2018no postage\u2019 deal, but generally, don\u2019t most people Google a\u00a0dodgy website<\/strong>, and stream for free?<\/p>\n It seems I am not entirely \u2018with it.\u2019<\/p>\n According to www.koin.com (a news station in Oregon), an unnamed 28-year-old professional poker player from Newport, Oregon, has had assets and cash seized by the Feds totalling more than $4m ($3,926,478.11 in cash\/bank accounts, undisclosed cryptocurrency, and a $336,000 home purchased in Jan 2017).<\/p>\n The player remains unnamed because nobody has charged him or her with a crime with the solicitor for the defence issuing a statement stating:<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t generally comment on a current case, but as a matter of principle the government should not grab a person\u2019s assets and strip them of their resources unless and until proven guilty.\u201d<\/p>\n Prosecutors said that several websites, including Noobroom.com, nobroom7.com, superchillin.com, Movietv.to and Sit2play.com had been receiving hundreds of thousands of payments from subscribers to download TV shows and movies illegally.<\/p>\n According to IRS Agent Keith Druffel, the accused earned an average of $400,000 per year in revenue during 2014 & 2015, more than $1m in 2016, more than $2.2m in 2017, and $500,000 per month in 2018. Homeland Security became aware of the scheme after PayPal contacted them over the size of the transactions coming through the payment processor. News reports suggest that the accused had more than $6.3 million deposited into a Stripes account (PayPal\u2019s competitor).<\/p>\n The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had previously tried to shut down the websites, but they kept popping up like childhood acne.<\/p>\n \u201cApproximately, five days after the MPAA sent the cease-and-desist letter to Noobroom, the MPAA received an email to its undercover subscription at Noobroom\u2026 The email advised that user accounts had been moved to a new website, www.superchillin.com\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n The Feds tried to find out if the person responsible for the scheme had a \u2018legitimate\u2019 job that could explain the large deposits, but couldn\u2019t find one.<\/p>\n Given the leading money earner in Oregon is Annie Duke, and her tally doesn\u2019t come as far north as $5m, then it\u2019s going to take some fast talking for the culprit to get out of this one<\/p>\n