Three men have been jailed for a total of 17 years after they supplied pubs with illegal TV boxes that allowed them to stream Premier League football matches at a heavily reduced price.
Steven King, 50, Paul Rolston, 53, and Daniel Malone, 41, were all found guilty at Warwick Crown Court.
The conmen supplied the pubs with set-top boxes that were capable of receiving both satellite and internet signals, starting their scam in 2008.
The boxes meant that landlords could screen Premiership games and other sporting events without making the appropriate payments to official broadcasters.
The court heard how broadcasters such as Sky TV lost more than £10 million pounds in revenue as a result of the scam.
King, Rolston and Malone all denied conspiring to defraud broadcasters and the FA and Premier League.
But they were found unanimously guilty by a jury following a four week trial.
On Wednesday King, of Stoke, Coventry, was jailed for seven years and four months.
He had ‘playing the leading role’ through his companies called Digital Switch and then Dreambox TV Ltd.
King’s ‘right-hand man’ Rolston, of Holbrooks, Coventry, was jailed for six years and four months.
Malone, of Potters Green, Coventry, was described as ‘a cog in the machine’ and was sentenced to three years and three months behind bars.
Sentencing, Judge Peter Cooke said: ‘I don’t accept that ambiguity surrounding copyright law was anything other than a fig leaf for an operation which was widely understood to be illegal.
‘It deprived the generators of the broadcasts of their income stream, and that must have been apparent from the outset.
‘It is right you were not the creators of this market, but it was corrupt and dishonest at the top, and it was corrupt and dishonest at the customer end.
‘Publicans who were happy to put £4,000 of additional money through the till on a Saturday afternoon baulked at paying Sky for the service that was bringing customers in, seeking to steal a march on the pubs down the road that were not acting dishonestly.
‘You were the middle men. But when you lend your weight to a conspiracy to defraud which does multi-million pounds worth of harm, then the upper reaches of the guidelines must engage.
‘You Steve King set up this business in Coventry. You saw an avenue you sought dishonestly to exploit, and it was not long before you recruited Mr Rolston.
‘You ran a thoroughly dishonest business for a decade, causing a loss to broadcasters and copyright holders running into many millions of pounds.
‘I bear in mind the business was not wholly illicit – but the lion’s share of it was.’
Judge Cooke told Rolston: ‘I accept you were taken into a pre-existing business.
‘But you were very much Mr King’s right-hand man. You were pretty pivotal to the way this business operated in a thoroughly corrupt enterprise.’