A fraudster who made more than £2 million selling set-top boxes preloaded with Disney and Sky channels has been jailed for two and a half years. Web designer Halton Powell, 44, sold at least 24,000 set-top boxes for around £100 each through eBay, his website and retail outlets between December 2014 and March 2016.
His fraud was said to have cost Sky £14 million in lost subscription fees. He launched his own company Droidsticks Ltd in 2013 and intellectual property cops began a probe in March 2015 after an online marketplace reported a large number of the boxes were being sold through an account owned by his company.
It was selling set-top boxes pre-loaded with a piece of software referred to as the ‘Droidsticks Wizard’, which allowed users to install add-ons to access Sky’s sports and film channels, as well as Disney Plus. Set-top boxes that contain this software at the point of sale are illegal.
