Belgian pay-TV pirate forfeits PayPal loot
December 10, 2012 11.48 Europe/London By Julian Clover
A joint operation between content security companies I***** and Nagra and the pay-TV company M7 has resulted in the conviction of a Belgian TV pirate.
Ahmad Masroor was convicted in court in Herselt Court for operating an illegal commercial control word sharing server. Masroor was sentenced to 10 months imprisonment and ordered to forfeit €50,000 in a PayPal account that was used to collect subscriptions to the illegal service.
Work on the case began in 2009 and was focused on the CCcam.tv website that offered pirate subscriptions to pay-TV content including M7’s TV Vlaanderen, TéléSAT and CanalDigital platforms.
“M7 will continue to fight piracy with both legal and technical means. We have joint forces with CA vendors and other pay TV operators throughout Europe to further increase the effect of our counter measures,” said Hans Troelstra, COO, M7 Group.
Masroor had been using control word sharing piracy, illegally using a regularly changing control word that is passed between a smart card and a set-top-box.
A security director of the I***** Anti-Piracy & Forensics Unit, said, “The result of this case is significant not only for the strong conviction, but is one of the first cases where assets in the form of profits in a PayPal account were forfeited.
