Sparks Group Members Face Federal Charges For Piracy

Three men are facing federal charges for their involvement in an international piracy group that has been illegally distributing movies and TV shows online since 2011.

Indictments unsealed Wednesday charged Umar “Artist” Ahmad and Jonatan “Raid” Correa with copyright infringement for their illegal connection with Sparks Group, a notorious organization that distributes pirated copies of movies and television shows on the Internet.

Another accomplice, George Bridi, will face copyright infringement and wire fraud conspiracy charges. He was arrested over the weekend in Cyprus following an INTERPOL Red Notice. Correa meanwhile was arrested Tuesday in Olathe, Kansas, while Ahmad, a citizen of Norway, remains at large.

The United States will seek Bridi’s extradition to stand trial in the country, according to a news release by the Department of Justice.

“The group allegedly circumvented copyright protections on nearly every movie released by major production studios, as well as television shows and distributed them by way of a worldwide network of servers,” said acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss in the release.

The indictment pointed out that “between 2011 and the present,” Ahmad, Bridi and Correa, as members of the Spark Group, shared on the Internet movies and television shows prior to their release dates. The group also “fraudulently obtained” copyrighted copies of DVD and Blu-ray discs from wholesale distributors in advance of their scheduled retail release dates.

The group’s illegal scheme made Ahmad and Bridi arrange for the discs to be picked up, mailed or delivered from distributors located in Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey to other members of Spark, including Correa, before their release dates. The trio would then reproduce and “aided and abetted” the reproduction of the discs using computer software that circumvented copyright protections on the discs, the news release added.

Following the arrests of Bridi and Correa, other privacy sites and their members panicked had “disappeared or gone into hiding,” TorrentFreak’s Andy Maxwell said in an article. The bust of Spark is part of a bigger plot to put down “several major movie release groups.” Geckos and Drones have also been targeted in a series of raids.

“The reality, it now transpires, is that the events of Tuesday had their roots in an investigation that started months – maybe even years ago,” Maxwell added.

The arrests and the shutdown of Sparks servers around the world came as a joint effort by law enforcement in 18 other countries as well as support coming from Eurojust, Europol, HSI and the Postal Inspection Service.

“The servers that were the pipeline for wholesale theft of intellectual property are now out of service,” said Strauss.