Today, the Italian Financial Police applied an injunction of the Tribunal of Agropoli, thus arresting, after 6 months of inquiries, the founder of “Italianshare.net” and other notorious audiovisual piracy portals.

Among the crimes contested to “Tex Willer”, nickname of the arrested
49-years old person from Naples, not only the illegal supply of
downloads/streaming contents hosted on cyberlocking websites and P2P networks, but also the unauthorized and illegal sale of personal data of users registered to the seized portals, the illegal use of non-Italian PayPal accounts
registered in the name of unaware figureheads to receive donations and the illegal perception of profits by means of advertising banners over the websites, for a total amount of around 580.000 Euros, plus 83.000 Euros of eluded VAT.

The most grave allegations are those concerning, obviously, the many violations
of copyright, for a total range from 3 to 32 millions of Euro.

The case at hand shows a new stratification of illegal activities, upon the grave one of audiovisual piracy: the user “Tex Willer” made money not only by means of advertising banners over websites created to allow illegal download/streaming of copyrighted material, but also used such websites to collect data from its registered users (usernames, passwords, email addresses, IP addresses) and sold them without any prior consent by the user themselves, totally disdaining copyright and privacy laws.