The two founders of Applanet.com – Aaron Blake Buckley and Gary Edwin Sharp – have plead guilty to distributing over 4 million apps.
This equates to over R244,543,300 worth of pirated goods.
This is according to the US Department of Justice (DOJ), which said the men “conspired to reproduce and distribute” copyrighted Android apps from May 2010 to August 2012.
Applanet acted as a pirated form of the Google Play store, making various Android games and applications which developers usually charged for available for free.
In addition, Sharp also lead another online piracy group – the SnappzMarket Group. This group was said to have helped distribute over a million pirated Android apps, with a total retail value of more than R16,851,915.
The FBI seized the domains for Applanet and SnappzMarket on 21 August 2012. Buckley and Sharp are to be sentenced on 1 August 2016.
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