Bill Omar Carrasquillo, a popular YouTuber, was recently federally indicted for a scheme to steal intellectual property for his channel “Omni in a Hellcat.”
The Philadelphia resident has been charged by the FBI in one of the most prominent cable television piracy cases in history, reported The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Bill Omar has an interesting history. Within three years, he went from selling drugs on the street to a YouTuber who made millions of dollars by starting his own subscription streaming service.
His “Omni in a Hellcat” channel amassed over 800,000 followers, and he documented his journey.
Of course, he had to add fancy cars and catchy hip-hop tunes to maximize the pizazz. Unfortunately, nobody apprised him of the fact that pizazz is usually what makes the hairs on the back of federal law enforcement’s neck stand up.
The United States Department of Justice page says Bill Omar and three other men engaged in a nearly three-year-long scheme that involved pirating copyrighted material.
The defendants “operated a large-scale cable theft scheme between at least March 2016 and at least November 2019, in which they fraudulently obtained cable television accounts and then resold copyrighted content to thousands of their own subscribers,” the release read.
For their efforts, the men made an estimated $30 million. Bill Omar is in even more trouble because once he was indicted, law enforcement came to confiscate the items that he bought to launder the money, such as cars and real estate. He gave them false information and attempted to hide some of the wealth.
Stealing intellectual property is a federal crime. While enjoying a souped-up Amazon Firestick is one thing, stealing all six hundred seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and charging others to watch it can land a person in prison.
If Bill Omar is convicted, he faces up to 514 years in prison.
