Box Android Pirate: justice condemns the king of IPTV
English electronics engineer Halton Powell started selling Android boxes in 2014 under the name AndroidSticks. Google did not appreciate seeing its name borrowed in this way and very quickly the company changed to “DroidSticks”. The particularity of these boxes and HDMI stick under Android? The possibility of deploy an IPTV system providing access to pay channels, in particular that of the Sky group, which is very popular in England. These are actually cheap Chinese Android boxes where Halton installs Kodi and an “in-house” assistant to add different add-ons and achieve its ends: watch sports or recent movies without paying a subscription.
On the advertisements and descriptions of the boxes one could read “Kodi Fully Loaded”. You know what I mean.
Pirate boxes for sale on Amazon. OKLM.
But where were these boxes sold? On the Darknet? No way ! Halton made them available on eBay or Amazon stores. It must be said that 2014-2015, IPTV was very confidential and the business went almost unnoticed. But very quickly, he will start selling his boxes in one store, then several. Trouble then begins for our electronics engineer: eBay suspends the activity of his shop and Sky takes him to court. After a seizure of more than 1400 devices in 2016, he still continues his activity, but now avoids talking about hacking on the official DroidSticks forums. Too late for our English pirate. Police reveal 24,515 devices sold on eBay generated £2.3m in his account and justice is catching up with him (€2.6m)
Heavy is the arm of justice
For Sky, Powell’s activity made him lose 13.8 million pounds (16 million euros). Generally, in these cases, the rights holders consider that “piracy = an unrealized purchase”, which is not necessarily the case of course. Yet the sentence fell a few days ago: 30 months in prison for Powell! It is more than certain accomplices of terrorist attack. Apparently the hacker didn’t live the high life as the police are still looking for property to confiscate.
