On 27 August this year, City of London Police published a press release under the headline: "Man in his 60s jailed for 6.5 years after making over £980,000 through illegal streaming."
The release came with statements from the Federation Against Copyright Theft, the Premier League, Sky and BBC Studios, and FACT published the same release on its own website the following day.
It said a 68-year-old from Chorley had been "found guilty of conspiracy to defraud" at Preston Crown Court, and that his business ran on 80 servers, sold subscriptions to customers worldwide, particularly British expats, and generated £980,812 "over a three-year period".
As TorrentFreak notes, the official releases did not name the service, did not say when the offences took place, and said nothing about the court's reasoning.
Several outlets filled in the blanks themselves. The Mirror reported that a "major closure has taken place after a man behind a popular illegal streaming service was recently arrested", and that the server seizure had left customers "with nothing more than blank screens". IBC reported that all 80 servers "have now been seized". A French site wrote that British justice had "just dismantled" the operation. BleepingComputer suggested the seized servers "may lead to the identification of users".
TorrentFreak obtained the revised indictment. All three counts run from 1 June 2013 to 10 August 2016.
That end date is the day of the raid. On 10 August 2016, officers from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit searched a business and three homes in Chorley. TorrentFreak reported on the raid at the time, the following day.
The Crown Prosecution Service confirmed that the service, unnamed in the release, was "initially known as 'Ex Pat TV' and latterly 'My TV Abroad'", a rebrand that happened before the raid. With those names, TorrentFreak located an archived copy of the old website from 15 July 2016, less than four weeks before the raid, carrying a banner: "BIG RE-BRAND! Ex-Pat TV is now My TV Abroad." The site offered "live UK channels, anywhere in the world" from £19 a month, with no VPN required.
Preston Crown Court confirmed that the defendant pleaded guilty to two counts, and the CPS said the plea came five days into the trial. Asked about the "found guilty" wording, City of London Police told TorrentFreak: "The jury did find him guilty but he plead guilty before. The terminology is fine to use for either."
The indictment names three defendants, although the release mentions only one. The Crown did not proceed against the other two, who were not convicted.
None of this changes the outcome, TorrentFreak says: the sentence stands at six and a half years, with Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings to recover the £980,812. Why the police and FACT left the other details out is unknown.
What the release withheld is worth stating plainly, because it amounts to one thing. It withheld a year.
Everything else in it was accurate. The raid happened. The 80 servers existed. The money was made. The sentence was passed. The only missing element was when, and when is the entire difference between an enforcement record and a news story.
Remove that single element and a decade-old operation is returned to the present tense, where reporters found it and conjugated it accordingly: has taken place, have now been seized, just dismantled. No outlet invented anything. Each supplied the tense that a document without dates implies, which is the one the reader is standing in.
This newspaper therefore records what appears to be the cheapest enforcement action available to any agency anywhere: an operation that has already concluded, announced again, with the year removed. It requires no officers, no warrants and no servers, because the servers were seized in 2016 and are available to be seized again at any time.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has reviewed the method and finds only one limit on it. The sentence can be announced once a year indefinitely, but it can only be served once.