According to court documents, Bill Omar Carrasquillo, 35, of Swedesboro, New Jersey; Jesse Gonzales, 42, of Pico Rivera, California; and Michael Barone, 36, of Richmond Hill, New York, operated a large-scale cable theft scheme between at least March 2016 and at least November 2019, in which they fraudulently obtained cable television accounts and then resold copyrighted content to thousands of their own subscribers. According to the indictment, the defendants also made fraudulent misrepresentations to banks and merchant processors in an effort to obtain merchant processing accounts. The defendants allegedly earned more than $30 million from the scheme.
As alleged, Carrasquillo converted a large portion of his profits into homes and dozens of vehicles, including high-end sports cars. When agents attempted to seize those items pursuant to judicially-authorized warrants, Carrasquillo made false statements about and attempted to hide some of those vehicles, including a Freightliner recreational vehicle and a McLaren sports vehicle.
Carrasquillo had built an empire of IPTV streaming services that captured Comcast, Verizon, Spectrum, DirecTV, and Frontier Communications broadcasts, and then illegally retransmitted them over the internet at knockdown prices.