In an unusual case of digital asset forfeiture, German police have seized some $30 million in cryptocurrency held by operators of movie2k.to, a shady purveyor of pirated content.
The platform, which has been officially closed since 2013, apparently delivered 880,000 pirated copies of films over the next five years, according to allegations.
One of the two main operators of the site has been in police custody for months, reports Marie Huillet at Cointelegraph.
The American FBI has gotten involved to assist German law enforcement in investigations including 22,000 bitcoins seized as “damage reparation” according to Huillet’s reporting.
So to recap – international law enforcement teams have confiscated significant amounts of cryptocurrency, not due to the misuse of digital assets, but on claims of movie piracy and copyright infringement.
It’s an example of what you might call ‘retail investigation’ – rather than using a fraudulent ICO or business model as a pretext, agents are seizing assets based on intellectual property theft – but Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash got caught up in the dragnet.
“Movie2k broke down because of copyright infringement concerns,” writes an author at VideoGrabber, explaining the situation. “Motion Picture Association (MPA) filed a complaint against Movie2k and another site called Download4all because of piracy issues. MPA won and the court ordered the two sites to be blocked, which is the reason why Movie2k is no longer accessible. However, there is another site that you can access, which was created by Movie2k’s original webmaster. It’s Movie4k.to… Because it’s from the same webmaster, you should still be able to watch old and new films with high quality. This new site does not host any of the videos. It serves as a directory of sites that host these movies and a place to stream them. Do not download any videos from the site for commercial purposes or for distribution.”
In an age where regulators like the SEC try to force operators like Telegram to disclose financial records based on how they roll out crypto programs, efforts like those taken against the movie site show that there’s also what you do with crypto that can land you in a lot of hot water. When investing in a firm, always scrutinize both of these important considerations.
