Dodgy firestick owners ‘really could’ face jail in crackdown - but users slam the ‘real criminals’

• Dodgy firestick users told they could face jail in crackdown.
• Prison sentences of five years have been threatened.
• But users have hit back and slammed the ‘real criminals’.

If you own a ‘dodgy’ firestick you “really could” face an investigation and even a prison sentence, users have been warned. It follows a crackdown on illegal streaming devices last year.

The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) partnered with police forces across the country to target sellers and visit homes. See the full list of areas that were included in the winter.

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But while the authorities have usually gone after people who sell so-called dodgy firesticks, they have warned that users could also be investigated. Here’s all you need to know:

‘Dodgy’ firestick users ‘really could’ face investigations

FACT’s chairman Kieron Sharp revealed that in the last five years, the authority has been involved in 23 prosecutions leading to 36 criminals being jailed for an average of nearly three years each in the last five years, The Mirror reports.

He added: “This has been a problem forever, since the days of pirated video cassettes and DVDs. But the rise of streaming has made things easier for the criminal in the same way as it has made things easier for the legal consumer.

“Is it any more of a problem than it was years ago? That’s very difficult to say. There’s no complete picture of the landscape.”

Keiron continued: “If we take out a gang and they have a customer database, we would normally write to the consumers on that customer list telling them ‘What you are doing is breaking the law and you will have to stop’. We would like to think that they would start paying for that content.

“But it is entirely possible that consumers could get swept up in our investigations. It would be a discussion for everybody involved in the business to see if that is an area that we would want to go down. It could happen, it really could. I would never say to any of the consumers through the messaging that we do that they are not going to get prosecuted because that just isn’t correct.”

People have been warned that the maximum sentence in prison could be up to five years for illegal streaming.

Users hit back at the ‘real criminals’ amid crackdown

But firestick users have hit back at what they called the “real criminals” amid the crackdown.

One person wrote: “[Streaming services] the criminals charging what they charge.” While another echoed: “If it didn’t cost more per month than Firesticks do for a year, not to mention the fact that there are still plenty of games you legally cannot watch in the UK, you wouldn’t have a problem.”

A person added: “Maybe bring the price down and you'll see fewer "dodgy" fire stick users.”

One social media user wrote: “They already struggle for prison space when it comes to criminals, how are they going to put the millions of firestick users in prison too?”

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