FACT also investigates fraud and cybercrime, and provides global due diligence services to support citizenship investment and trade, business, financial and legal compliance.
FACT protects the intellectual property rights of global organisations including Premier League, TNT Sports, Virgin Media and Sky.
[citation needed] In June 2009, FACT brought criminal prosecution against the company Scopelight and its founder, Anton Vickerman, for running a pirate video search engine called Surfthechannel.com, which had a substantial user base and was a highly profitable illegal business.
[1] Vickerman was charged with two counts of Conspiracy to Defraud and a criminal trial took place at Newcastle Crown Court in June and July 2012 in front of His Honour Judge Evans.
An accomplice, Bannister, was ordered to carry out 140 hours of unpaid work after he was found guilty of transferring criminal property contrary to Section 327(1)(d) of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.
In June 2013, FACT pressured the Usenet file indexing site called NZBsRus to close after issuing cease-and-desist letters to the owner and several staff members.
[8] In 2016, a FACT-supported investigation led to the first criminal case involving a supplier of illegal IPTV boxes enabling viewers to watch unauthorised content.
Terry O'Reilly and Will O'Leary were selling devices to pubs and consumers which facilitated mass piracy, including the broadcasting of Premier League football on unauthorised channels.
In 2018, following a FACT-assisted case the owner of the company Evolution Trading, Jon Haggerty, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud and dishonestly obtaining services for another.
[11] Three men provided illegal access to Premier League football to more than 1,000 pubs, clubs and homes throughout England and Wales and used a range of technologies to commit fraud over the course of a decade.
A joint operation between Greater Manchester Police and FACT found that a company managed by Aimson sold IPTV devices between September 2016 and May 2017 that allowed customers to bypass paywalls and access subscription sport and film channels for free.
[14] In 2021, in the first conviction of its type in the UK, a man who created and built a software package which enabled illegal access to BT Sport, Sky, Netflix and other subscription television content via apps and add-ons for the Kodi media player was sentenced to two and a half years’ imprisonment.
"[18] was released in 1995 and featured a young girl named Rebecca trying to watch a pirated VHS tape on a TV, ending with a VCR falling down with the words on top: "VIDEO PIRACY.
[19] It featured a man destroying many items with an X-shaped branding iron, ending with the FACT logo and UK & Ireland (or in Universal's case, Australia & New Zealand as well) hotlines.
With the advent of DVD, FACT borrowed the Motion Picture Association's anti-piracy spot "You Wouldn't Steal a Car", which concentrated more on copyright infringement through peer-to-peer file sharing and less on counterfeit copies.
The spot related the peer-to-peer file sharing of movies to stealing a handbag, a car, and other such items (similar to the US FAST "Piracy is theft" slogan of the 1990s).