Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2010/01/07/oink_admin_court/
Prosecutors claim BitTorrent admin had $300K
OiNK man in court
Posted in Legal, 7th January 2010 16:25 GMT
Alan Ellis, the 26-year old man accused of administering the OiNK file sharing service, told a court today he was not guilty of conspiracy to defraud.
Ellis was arrested in October 2007 for running the invite-only site. He was pinched in Middlesborough, and servers in Holland were seized by Dutch police in raids code-named 'Operation Ark Royal'.
The IT worker has always insisted that he offered no more than an indexing service, like Google, and was not responsible for the content members were making available to each other.
Cleveland police alleged at the time he was making hundreds of thousands of pounds from the site. Prosecutors' claimed today that Ellis, 24 at the time of his arrest, had nearly $300,000 in his PayPal accounts.
Peter Makepeace, for the prosecution, told Teesside Crown Court: "This is not about prosecuting some poor minnow who has taped a record one night and circulated it to their friends. This is about large scale, professional, clever, technical ripping off", according to The Times
In June 2008 police arrested six people accused of sharing files via the OiNK.cd domain.
The site specialised in high quality and pre-release music files. ®