A Clacton man who sold “loaded” Amazon Fire TV Sticks to more than 540 people – then charged them a yearly fee to keep the illegal streams coming – has walked free from court with a suspended sentence.
Aaron Smith, 41, had more than £72,000 paid into his bank accounts, according to Essex Police, after advertising the sticks on WhatsApp and Facebook from as early as October 2020.
And he’d been warned. In December 2023, Essex Police sent Smith a cease-and-desist letter, the same one every other identified user got, spelling out the criminal offences he’d be committing if he carried on accessing illegal streaming services.
He carried on anyway, and a year later the police were at his door.
In court, Smith claimed he hadn’t realised any of it was illegal. The judge was having none of it.
But the kind of stick he was selling is exactly what Amazon has spent the past year trying to make impossible.
£80 A Stick, £75 A Year
Smith’s offer was simple. According to Essex Live, which covered the case at Chelmsford Crown Court, he charged £80 for a Fire TV Stick set up to access sports and film channels.
After that came the subscription: a £75 yearly renewal to keep the access working. He also offered a “troubleshooting” service for when things went wrong – which, with illegal streams, they tend to.
The court heard that Smith was a former bathroom salesman, and his defence said a lot of the people who signed up were friends and family.
Essex Police’s Proactive Money Laundering Team arrested him at his Clacton home in December 2024. He gave no comment in interview, and officers seized his laptop and phone.
Those turned out to be fairly chatty. Messages on the phone showed Smith advertising the devices as early as October 2020, while the laptop held conversations about selling the sticks, details of payment methods, and posters advertising the service.
The money trail did the rest. Police traced hundreds of payments linked to the devices into Smith’s accounts, and got an Account Freezing Order under the Proceeds of Crime Act, freezing funds they believed were criminal property.
Smith was charged with money laundering and the sale or hire of an article infringing copyright, and pleaded guilty to both at Chelmsford Crown Court on July 21.
On October 15, he was sentenced to two years in prison, suspended for two years, along with 150 hours of unpaid work and 30 hours of rehabilitation activities.
And the money isn’t settled yet: Proceeds of Crime hearings will now decide what can be confiscated.
“A Nice Little Earner”
Smith’s defence, Ella Ripper, told the court he was a man of previous good character who hadn’t understood how serious his conduct was.
Their version of events made Smith a middleman rather than a mastermind. He paid a monthly subscription to a company that provided the software and the service, they said, and he was the customer-facing salesman for that bigger operation.
They also told the court Smith had worked as a carer for an autistic man, and that his character references described him as dependable and trustworthy.
Judge Jamie Sawyer rejected that claim entirely. He called it “ridiculous”, pointing out that Smith had submitted character references praising his intelligence.
“Let’s be honest you thought that this was a nice little earner,” the judge told him.
He also spelled out who pays for this: the people with legitimate TV subscriptions, who see their fees go up because people like Smith decide not to pay, and encourage others not to pay either.
Sky and Warner Bros. Discovery, co-owner of TNT Sports, both gave statements to the court setting out their losses, though neither could put an exact figure on how much Smith’s sales had cost them.
Detective Sergeant Mike Monkton, from Essex Police’s Proactive Money Laundering Team, saw it rather differently: “This was a criminal enterprise. The evidence showed Smith put himself at the centre of organised crime.”
“Every device undermines legitimate broadcasters and sports clubs down to a community level who rely on legal revenue,” he added.
What Is A “Dodgy Firestick”?
IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television, which simply means TV delivered over the internet rather than through an aerial, a satellite dish or a cable. Netflix is IPTV. So is BBC iPlayer. There’s nothing illegal about the technology.
What makes it illegal is the content. Unofficial IPTV services stream Sky Sports, TNT Sports, films and premium channels without paying a penny for the rights, and sell access for a fraction of the real price.
That’s where the Fire TV Stick comes in. It’s Amazon’s streaming stick: you plug it into the HDMI port on your TV, and it runs apps like Netflix, iPlayer and Disney+.
For more than a decade, Fire TV Sticks ran Fire OS, Amazon’s own system built on top of Android. And Android allowed something called sideloading – installing apps from outside Amazon’s official App Store.
Plenty of people sideloaded for perfectly legitimate reasons. But it also made the Firestick the perfect vehicle for piracy. A seller installs an illegal IPTV app, sets up the subscription, and hands over a stick that looks completely normal, sold as “fully loaded” or “jailbroken”.
The stick is the easy part. The subscription is the real product, and subscriptions run out – which is what Smith’s £75 renewal paid for, another year of access.
Watching Can Land You In Court Too
The detail that should worry Smith’s customers is that letter from 2023. It went to identified users of illegal streaming services, warning them about the criminal offences they’d be committing if they kept watching.
DS Monkton made the same point at sentencing: “those accessing the illegal streaming services also risk fines, criminal records or even prison for using them, as Smith knew when he received the cease-and-desist letter.”
That’s not an empty threat. In 2024, Liverpool’s Jonathan Edge was jailed for over three years for selling £30 modified Firesticks – and part of that sentence was specifically for watching the illegal streams himself.
Police found the details of around 500 of Edge’s customers on his phone. Last year, FACT (the Federation Against Copyright Theft) emailed and texted more than 1,000 people whose details had been seized in cases like his, warning them to stop or face prosecution.
Police now have Smith’s phone and laptop, and know he was supplying more than 540 people. Essex Police hasn’t said whether any of those customers will be hearing from it.
FACT, which supported the investigation, made it plain that sellers are being watched. “Anyone selling illegally modified streaming devices or profiting from pirated content should be under no illusion,” said Nick Sumner, its Investigations Manager.
“Police, rights holders and FACT are working closely to identify them, disrupt their operations and ensure they face the consequences.”
Smith got off lighter than some. Last October, Hitchin accountant Nishan Silva was jailed for three years over a £256,000 IPTV operation, and in July 2025, Thirsk’s Stephen Woodward got three years and one month for a £1 million streaming scheme that paid for a £91,000 Jaguar.
Why We May Not See Many More Firestick Cases
Smith’s business only worked because of sideloading, and every new Fire TV Stick Amazon now launches has it switched off for good.
Throughout the period police describe, from October 2020 to Smith’s arrest in December 2024, every Fire TV Stick Amazon sold ran Android.
By early 2025, the “dodgy Firestick” had become such a problem that Sky’s chief operating officer, Nick Herm, claimed Fire TV Sticks accounted for “probably about half” of Premier League piracy in the UK, as Sky publicly pushed Amazon to act.
Amazon did. In October 2025, it started blocking known piracy apps on its Android-based Fire TV devices, using intelligence from the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, an anti-piracy coalition that includes Sky and the Premier League.
The bigger move was Vega, Amazon’s new operating system. It looks almost identical to the old Fire TV, but underneath it’s built on Linux rather than Android, and you can only install apps from Amazon’s own store, full stop.
The first Vega stick, the Fire TV Stick 4K Select, arrived in autumn 2025. In April, Amazon’s developer site confirmed that every future stick will run Vega.
And last month, it launched the new Fire TV Stick 4K – running Vega, of course – while discontinuing both the Android-based 4K Plus and the Select. That leaves the £99.99 4K Max as the only Android-based stick left in Amazon’s line-up.
Take a Smith-style business to a new Fire TV Stick today, and it falls at the first step: there’s no simple way to get an unofficial app onto it.
It’s not hard to see why Amazon is happy with that. It doesn’t make much, if anything, on the stick itself. The money comes from what you do with it – subscriptions bought through Amazon, Prime Video rentals, and the adverts on the home screen.
Someone who buys a Firestick purely to watch pirated football isn’t doing any of that.
And then there’s the name. For years, “Firestick” has been shorthand for piracy in this country – Sky even claimed football fans were chanting “we’ve got our Fire Sticks” at matches. That’s not something any brand wants attached to its best-selling product.
When I spoke to Amazon’s Fire TV boss in June, he leaned on security, saying that “apps that facilitate piracy, and other apps, can carry malware.” Fair enough. But the pressure to close the door has had at least as much to do with stories like Smith’s.
The Next Dodgy Box Won’t Be A Firestick
None of this happens overnight. There are millions of Android-based Firesticks already plugged into TVs around the country, and they can still sideload apps. The 4K Max is still on sale, and the 4K Plus is around while stocks last.
But every new stick Amazon sells shrinks that pool a little further. As I concluded after that interview, within a few years, the choice won’t be between a Vega Firestick and an Android one – it’ll be between a Vega Firestick and no Firestick at all.
That doesn’t mean illegal streaming goes away. Research published last month by the anti-piracy campaign BeStreamWise found that more than half of illegal streamers now watch through social media, compared to around a quarter who use devices and paid illegal subscriptions.
And there are plenty of Android TV boxes Amazon has no control over.
So the next Aaron Smith will probably still be out there, flogging £80 “loaded” boxes to friends and family on WhatsApp. They just won’t be made by Amazon.
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