Some stories serve as a warning.
Not just to the people directly involved.
But to every single person who has ever opened a dodgy app, used an Amazon fire stick, or handed over a few quid a month for a stream they knew wasn’t quite right.
And the man at the centre of it is already sitting in a prison cell with eleven years to think about it.
Mark Gould faces another decade in prison as gang ordered to repay £3.75m
According to the New York Times, Mark Gould, has been ordered by Derby Crown Court to repay £2.35 million within three months, or face an additional ten-year prison sentence on top of the eleven years he’s already serving.
Four of his accomplices have been ordered to repay a further £1.4 million between them.
The combined total of £3.75 million makes this the second-largest confiscation order ever handed down against an illegal streaming operation in the United Kingdom.
The scale of what Gould built is extraordinary.
Between 2016 and 2021, he generated over £7 million in revenue.
The operation employed 30 members of staff, where it served more than 50,000 customers and resellers.
In May 2023, Gould and his four co-conspirators were sentenced to a combined total of more than 30 years in prison.
The largest piracy sentencing in history.
That case was privately prosecuted by the Premier League themselves.
The confiscation proceedings that followed have now reached their conclusion.
The message is deliberate.
Going to prison isn’t enough; the money comes back too.
Gould’s case represents the sharp end of a crackdown that has been building for years.
And shows absolutely no sign of slowing down.
Either repay £2.35 million within three months, or serve another decade.
That’s the difficult choice Mark Gould now faces.
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