PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — A professional poker player who rolled the dice on a scheme to sell pirated movies and TV shows was finally sentenced to prison, about 20 months after he pleaded guilty.
Talon White netted more than $8 million in his scheme that let paid subscribers stream and download thousands of copyright-protected movies and television shows. Over the course of 4 years, he set up numerous websites with the pirated material in an effort to avoid detection.
In 2019, White’s lawyer, Rain Minns told KOIN 6 News her client was a professional poker player.
Court documents show White, 31, began this scheme in 2013. The Motion Picture Association of America became aware of it in 2014 and ordered him to stop. Instead, he ignored them and continued until federal investigators searched his home in 2018.
In a 6-month period in 2018, authorities said White collected nearly $3 million in fees.
He was charged with copyright infringement and tax evasion on November 1, 2019, and pleaded guilty about 3 weeks later.
He was scheduled to be sentenced in February 2020 but wasn’t officially sentenced until Friday. He will spend one year and one day in federal prison and be on supervised release for 3 years. He faced a maximum of 5 years in prison.
White was also ordered to pay more than $4.3 million in restitution to the MPAA and IRS, must also forfeit all US currency and cryptocurrency seized from his bank accounts and he lost his Newport house that he bought using the illegally obtained money.