George Bridi, Video Piracy, New York 2021

A global video piracy ring that brought in tens of millions of dollars in losses to film production studios has been busted, with the arrest of George Bridi, a citizen of the United Kingdom.

BRIDI was extradited to the United States from Cyprus on August 31, 2021, and will be presented and arraigned before U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang.

BRIDI is charged with conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, wire fraud conspiracy, and conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property for his involvement in the Sparks Group, an international piracy group that illegally distributed movies and television shows on the Internet.

According to the allegations, BRIDI and his co-conspirators compromised the content’s copyright protections and reproduced and encoded the content in a format that could be easily copied and disseminated over the Internet.

BRIDI and his co-conspirators then uploaded copies of the copyrighted content onto servers controlled by the Sparks Group, where other members further reproduced and disseminated the content on streaming websites, peer-to-peer networks, torrent networks, and other servers accessible to public.

Codefendant Jonatan Correa, a/k/a “Raid,” previously pled guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and was sentenced on May 19, 2021, to three years and three months of supervised release, with the first three months to be served in community confinement.

Codefendant Umar Ahmad, a citizen of Norway, remains at large.

U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said: “As alleged, George Bridi was a member of an international video piracy ring that circumvented copyright protections on nearly every movie released by major production studios, as well as television shows, and distributed them worldwide on the Internet.

Tens of millions of dollars in losses have been caused to film production studios by the Sparks Group.

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