29-year-old Oregon man made $8 million running illegal streaming service, feds say
A 29-year-old Oregon man faces up to five years in prison after pleading guilty to running an illegal subscription-based video streaming service online, according to prosecutors.
Talon White of Newport pleaded guilty Monday to charges of tax evasion and copyright infringement, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon said in a news release.
Starting in 2013, White ran a scheme that copied and distributed “thousands of copyrighted movies and television shows” by creating “numerous websites that hosted the infringing material,” federal prosecutors in Eugene said.
Court records said White’s subscription-based scheme quickly succeeded financially, the Oregonian reported — earning him “$400,000 a year in 2014 and 2015, and in 2016 ... more than $1 million. In 2017, he earned more than $2.2 million. By 2018, White was averaging revenue of more than $500,000 per month from the websites.”
“Members of the public purchased subscriptions to websites created by White and were able to stream or download the video content,” prosecutors said. “The content included movies that had yet to be released to the public. In total, White’s scheme netted more than $8 million.”
But that wasn’t all: White also misreported his income by more than $4 million, purposefully evading nearly $2 million in taxes through 2017, according to prosecutors.
In addition to prison time, White faces “a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release on each of the two charges,” prosecutors said.
White is set to be sentenced in February.
White’s plea agreement requires him to pay $669,557 to the Motion Picture Association of America and $3,392,708 to the IRS, prosecutors said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said he “has also agreed to forfeit more than $3.9 million seized from his bank accounts, approximately $35,000 in cash, cryptocurrency holdings worth an estimated $424,000, and a 2,248 square foot home in Newport, Oregon, worth an estimated $415,000.”
Prosecutors called the case “one of the largest civil forfeitures in the district’s history.”
White’s scheme came to an end after a judge approved a search warrant for his home in November 2018, according to the Oregonian, which reported that “agents found and seized close to $33,000 from the initial search, and later searched White’s bank and cryptocurrency accounts, seizing millions of dollars.”
White’s sites included Movietv.to and Sit2play.com, the Oregonian reported.
