For almost a decade, Jetflicks offered one of the best streaming deals out there. For $9.99 a month—less, if prepaid for a longer increment of time—subscribers could access popular shows from across all the major networks and streaming platforms, commercial-free, as soon as the day after they aired. It was like having Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, and a basic cable subscription, all for the price of a fancy sandwich. If that sounds too good to be true, well… it was.
In late December 2016, a Jetflicks subscriber used the service to stream a recently released episode of The OA, a Netflix show with a fervent fan base. A week later, they downloaded two episodes of the Syfy network’s 12 Monkeys. It’s the kind of casual piracy that takes place on countless Kodi boxes and other devices every day, all over the world. Except this time, the customer was an undercover FBI agent.
A grand jury indictment this week charged eight people with allegedly operating two of the biggest illegal streaming sites in the country. They ran not out of some Eastern European server farm, but in Las Vegas, Nevada. They had a customer service line, a US bank account, and even put out the occasional press release. The biggest question might be how they kept going for so long.
Jetflicks and Chill
According to the indictment, which you can read in full below, Jetflicks dates back as far as 2007, the same year Netflix launched its streaming product. Over the years its alleged operators built it into a sophisticated streaming empire, at one point claiming to host 183,000 television episodes and more than 37,000 subscriber ..
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