14 DAY TRIAL // Three websites designed for spreading copyrighted material to Romanian and Romanian-speaking Moldavian users have been taken offline after a joint investigation by Romanian and US authorities.
FBI and about any other American law enforcement agency have always had the full cooperation of Romanian law enforcement in the past, working on numerous joint operations in the past, including yesterday's raids on Darkode, the famous forum where notorious hackers met online.
A month earlier, local law enforcement raided the local headquarters of a Romanian Web hosting company, xServers, along with other 10 locations across Bucharest.
This was carried out following a four-year old joint investigation by the FBI and the Prosecutor's Office attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice in Romania, which initiated in 2011.
According to the official press release and press coverage in Romania, prosecutors have arrested three people and confiscated various server equipment.
Romanian TV news station ProTV says that three websites were taken down, one of them even charging its users between €3 and €7 for access to its database, but their names were never mentioned.
Illegally selling teleshopping goods has landed someone in trouble
After sifting through some Romanian forums, we were able to identify the websites in question: serialepenet.ro (TV shows video streaming) which redirects to a classic seized domain page, fisierulmeu.ro (free music and video downloads) which is down completely, with no warning or message, and top-teleshop.ro, the weirdest of them all - a site for selling teleshopping goods (illegally of course).
Also according to the official press release, besides facing copyright infringement accusations, the people arrested in the raids were also accused of money laundering (2,000,000 Romanian Lei / $500,000 / €458,000), for which they used a company that administrated Web pages.
If found guilty, the three men can face each a penalty of 3 to 10 years in prison.
