Nearly 10,000 self-service albums.
A veritable digital and illegal music supermarket managed from an apartment in Amiens (Somme).
The administrator of an illegal downloading website was arrested last week by investigators from the Lille (North) research section.
The 30-year-old man had launched, with an accomplice based in Morocco, the nohazik.us site, which has been closed by the gendarmes since the arrest of the suspect.
It was the Society of Songwriters and Music Publishers (Sacem) which had reported the existence of this pirate site to the gendarmes specializing in digital crime.
In a few months, the website had accumulated more than 200,000 visits and generated more than 65 million illegal downloads.
According to Sacem, the damage caused by these illegal downloads exceeds 5 million euros.
The Association for the Fight against Audiovisual Piracy (ALPA), requested by the gendarmes, identifies many legal persons who are victims, producers, artists or distributors of the records made available on nohazik.us.
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A few weeks after being alerted by Sacem, investigators from the Center for the Fight against Digital Crime (C3N) of the Lille research section managed to identify an administrator of the site based in France. Located in Amiens, this Franco-Moroccan national had seen his website flourish in particular thanks to community word of mouth. In full swing, it had managed to double its attendance since the beginning of the year.
Computer scientist by profession, this man would however be only one cog of the illegal Internet site.
Endowed with significant technical skills, and considered as the "designer and manager of the site", he said during his custody that he had not received any money to animate Nohazik.
On the other hand, his accomplice based in Morocco is suspected of having pocketed money by monetizing visits to the sites through advertisements.
Placed under judicial control with the ban on leaving the territory, the Amiens was summoned to the criminal court on February 2, 2022.
