Swansea Crown Court (Image: Leighton Collins / Alamy)
Last Updated: 59 seconds ago
A Pembrokeshire postal worker who built up an illegal streaming operation with more than 1,800 customers – pocketing over £200,000 in the process – has been jailed for more than three years.
Michael David Barrow, from Milford Haven, was sentenced to 38 months in prison at Swansea Crown Court after pleading guilty to three offences of marking and supplying articles for use in a fraud. He has no previous convictions.
The operation
For more than four years from 2019, Barrow sold modified Amazon Fire TV Sticks and app subscriptions enabling customers to unlawfully watch content from Sky Sport, TNT Sport, and BT Sport, along with live events including major boxing matches and a library of more than 18,000 films.
Prosecuting on behalf of the Premier League, Ari Alibhai told the court customers paid around £120 per year for the service – a fraction of what the legitimate broadcasters charged. By Barrow’s own account, he built up a customer base of more than 1,800 people.
Barrow also had a “football-themed bar” at the rear of his property where prospective customers could see the illegal streams for themselves.
Secrecy and countermeasures
The court heard Barrow ran a tightly controlled setup. He only accepted new customers on the recommendation of existing ones and insisted on full names to prevent what he described as being “infiltrated by Sky agents”.
Payments were made through PayPal or bank transfer, with customers encouraged to disguise the transactions by labelling them as purchases of classic or retro football kits.
The prosecution said Barrow possessed a “significant degree of technical knowledge” which allowed him to advise customers on how to bypass countermeasures deployed by broadcasters to combat illegal streaming.
Continued offending
Barrow’s activities were reported to police in 2021 via the CrimeStoppers charity. Officers attended his Pembrokeshire home to warn him they knew what he was doing, serving a cease and desist notice and providing information about previous cases where defendants had received custodial sentences.
Despite all of this, Barrow carried on. He moved customer communications to the encrypted messaging app Telegram to try to avoid further detection. His Facebook account was also separately suspended for breaching intellectual property rules.
Financial investigation
A probe into Barrow’s finances revealed he had received more than £170,000 through PayPal – of which £167,000 was suspected of coming from the illegal streaming operation. A further £45,000 in payments linked to the scheme was traced to a bank account.
Alibhai told the court it was difficult to quantify the total damage to rights holders, but estimated the potential loss to Sky Sport, BT Sport, and TNT Sport alone – without accounting for overseas companies and other affected broadcasters – was in the region of £6 million.
Mitigation
Megan Williams, representing Barrow, said the pre-sentence report showed her client had expressed genuine remorse. She told the court the operation had started in 2019 as a “misguided wish” to help friends and family before it “snowballed” into something far larger. Williams added that the father-of-two had been seeking help with his mental health since his arrest.
Sentencing
Judge Paul Thomas told Barrow he had engaged in “large-scale commercial fraud” driven by nothing more than “pure greed”. The judge noted the defendant had maintained a “steady income” from his postal service job throughout the entire period of offending, and had continued despite knowing the custodial sentence he was likely to face.
Barrow was sentenced to 38 months in prison. He will serve 40% of the sentence in custody before being released on licence.
