Jetflicks dealt fatal blow as illegal streaming giant's final employee found guilty

The final piece of the puzzle has fallen into place after the last operator of the biggest illegal TV show streaming service in the US was found guilty.

Yoany Vaillant, 43, handed in his resume to a streaming company. He was a computer programmer with roughly 15 years of experience and claimed to know 27 computer languages.

With this high level of expertise, Valiant landed a job at the streaming service, where he worked tirelessly for four and a half months to ensure the website’s operations ran smoothly.

This included fixing issues affecting the automated downloading of content, processing, syncing, uploading, and streaming of the streamer's catalog of content.

However, this short stint in the company would land him a guilty verdict and potentially years behind bars.

This is because Valliant was a computer programmer for the illegal streaming service called Jetflicks.

Jetflicks was a pirate subscription-based streaming service allowing users to stream and download popular TV shows illegally.

According to the Department of Justice, Jetflicks operators would use sophisticated computer scripts and software to scour other popular pirated websites, like The Pirate Bay, for example, for copyrighted content they could use for their streaming service.

The computer scripts and software would supposedly run nonstop, stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted TV episodes.

At one point, Jetflicks claimed to have over 180,000 different TV episodes, far more than Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Amazon Prime.

When Jetflicks was up and running, the streaming platform served tens of thousands of subscribers throughout the US.

Jetflicks made the perpetrators millions of dollars in revenue at the streaming industry and copyright owners' expense.

According to the Department of Justice, Valiant worked with Kristopher Dallmann and Jared Jaurequi, two of Jetflicks' main operators, who were found guilty in June 2024.

The Department of Justice also said the June 2024 case was the largest and first illegal streaming case to go to trial.

While all eight operators have now been convicted, with two other computer programmers put behind bars, the remaining six perpetrators are due to be sentenced in February 2025.

Valliant, alongside four other operators, could face a maximum of five years in prison. Whereas Dallman could face a maximum of 48 years in prison as he was also found guilty of money laundering.