Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents

Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars

Industry-funded prosecution leads to 4-year sentence for SurfTheChannel owner.

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock





FACT confirmed the authenticity of the court documents for us but declined to get into the specifics of Vickerman's account—arguing that his conviction by a jury of his peers speaks for itself.

Getting their man

A screenshot. grew rapidly—so rapidly that it soon came to the attention of Hollywood. The site hosted no videos, but its meticulously organized collection of links made it popular with those seeking infringing content. And plenty of people were interested. At the site's peak in mid-2009, STC attracted hundreds of thousands of users per day, earning Vickerman up to £50,000 ($78,500) per month in advertising revenue.

FACT wanted to shutter the site, but first it had to find out who was running the thing. Vickerman had kept a low profile, registering the domain through an anonymizing service and purchasing server space offshore. Undeterred, FACT hired an investigator named Pascal Hetzscholdt to pose as a potential investor who lured Vickerman to a London hotel on July 10, 2008. While the two ate lunch, a surveillance team recorded the encounter from a nearby table. Investigators working for FACT then tracked Vickerman back to his home 250 miles north of London in Gateshead.

The contents of that lunch discussion are disputed. Vickerman insists that he "did not discuss anything whatsoever about movies, illegality, or other such matters." Hetzscholdt has a different recollection. In a report filed after the meeting, he stated that Vickerman discussed plans to "experiment with using the BitTorrent network as the infrastructure to offer popular current films through STC." The whole thing was recorded, so the truth should have been a simple matter to verify—but FACT says that no audio of the meeting exists, making it impossible to check Hetzscholdt's story. Vickerman suspects foul play.

"I am firmly of the belief that such an audio recording did exist but that it was 'disappeared' by FACT Ltd due to it containing nothing controversial," he wrote.

Enlarge / Form seeking authorization under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to conduct "directed surveillance" of Vickerman during the London hotel meeting. Contrary to FACT's claims, Vickerman was not in the business of selling counterfeit DVDs.

FACT soon discovered that the home Vickerman shared with his wife was for sale. So, two days after the London meeting, another FACT agent posed as a potential buyer in order to access the residence. The agent covertly recorded the home walk-through and filed a detailed report on the operation.

Meanwhile, FACT was busy collecting other information about Vickerman. The group asked the satellite provider BSkyB for information about the couple's satellite TV subscription, for instance. An investigator tailed Vickerman's wife Kelly on a day's errands. The Guardian reports that "other private eyes had already obtained detailed information about his bank accounts, cars, and telephone records." FACT was nothing if not thorough.

On August 18, 2008, Northumbria police raided the Vickermans' home. Vickerman says that FACT agents participated in the raid and that they were "clearly directing the police." A FACT spokesman declined to comment to us on this allegation, but court documents do indicate that FACT was heavily involved in planning the raid. FACT, for instance, hired the forensic investigator used in the case.

In an e-mail sent a week prior to the raid, FACT's Colin Tansley outlined a plan for FACT's investigators to take down STC and replace it with a seizure notice. Vickerman says this plan failed because FACT believed, inaccurately, that the STC servers were located inside Vickerman's house. (The servers were actually located in Sweden, beyond the reach of FACT and the Northumbria police.) When we asked, FACT again refused to comment on Vickerman's allegations.

During the search, Vickerman and his wife were both arrested. Vickerman told both police and FACT investigators that the STC site was, in his view, legal; it acted "as a search engine" and was exempt from liability, he said.

The Vickermans were soon released on bail, but the other shoe was about to drop. Their cash was about to be seized.

Enlarge / Work order requesting forensic investigator to take down STC site and replace it with a FACT logo.

Asset freeze

Two weeks later, on September 1, investigator Alan Connolly from the Bedfordshire Trading Standards Financial Investigations Unit showed up at the Vickermans' home. He knocked on the front door and presented them with an "asset restraint order," which the unit had taken out at FACT's request. Vickerman claims that he and his wife were then barred from accessing any of their funds, aside from £125 per week, per person, to cover living expenses. As a result of the order, Vickerman says that he "started to default on my bills and rapidly started spiraling into severe financial problems."

The Bedfordshire Trading Standards Financial Investigations Unit (BTSFIU) has a grandiose name but a strange history—and it's hardly the impartial agent of government justice its name might suggest. A statement on the agency's website explains that, in 2007, the "Bedfordshire Trading Standards Service was approached" by FACT and "offered a unique sponsorship opportunity" to create the Financial Investigation Unit. With FACT's generous support, the BTSFIU was soon able to focus on conducting piracy-related property confiscations.

Indeed, so deep is the partnership that, on the form used to request an asset confiscation, the agency states that "priority will be given to those referrals that involve cinematic piracy." Vickerman says he filed a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed that "BTSFIU had made 23 similar restraint order applications in 2008, all on behalf of FACT."

In a Tuesday interview, FACT spokesman Eddy Leviten brushed off any suggestion that the financial ties between FACT and the BTSFIU created a conflict of interest, however.

"The banking industry in the UK funds the check and credit bureau in the Metropolitan Police," he told us. "It's something that happens in the UK where private industry can fund specific units within law enforcement to take on a specific role. Those units still have to withstand the same scrutiny" as any other law enforcement agency. We e-mailed two BTSFIU agents seeking comment on the relationship but never got a response.

Unable to spend his own funds on legal representation, Vickerman borrowed money from his father to hire an attorney who challenged the asset freeze. According to Vickerman, "It turns out it is unlawful for BTS to act outside of Bedforshire County," so the asset freeze was cancelled about a month after it had been put into place.

And the news got even better for Vickerman. It soon emerged that the government had no interest in charging him with a crime. Indeed, the government wasn't even convinced he had committed one.

Enlarge / The instructions of the BTSFIU asset confiscation form notes that priority is given to piracy cases.

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