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West Midlands factory raid nets large illegal videogame haul

by Steven Williamson on 11 December 2008, 11:34

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A factory suspected of producing thousands of counterfeit video games, film and music - with an estimated street value of £1million - has been stopped following a raid in the West Midlands.

The raid, in which 30,000 illegally copied discs were seized, was carried out on Friday December 5th at commercial premises in Brierley Hill, West Midlands. Other raids were carried out on the same day in the Sandwell area, including a market stall and a residential property.

West Midlands Police officers and members of Sandwell Council's Trading Standards Department carried out the raids.

Huge quantities of illegally copied discs were found at the Brierley Hill premises. DVD duplicators were also found in an alcove behind a notice board.

Recovered from the premises were 10,000 blank discs and 30,000+ fraudulent software titles, including recent films and music such as High School Musical 3, Hancock and Mummy 3. That haul included at least 9,000 unlawfully copied discs containing videogame titles.

The majority of copied discs were housed in CD cases and it is believed that the purpose of the 'business' was independent sales and supplying discs for sale around the region. Seven computers attached to 35 DVD re-writers, three printers, 19 hard drives, 15 Xbox 360 consoles, two Wii consoles and a number of circumvention devices for 'chipping' games consoles were also recovered. All hardware is being forensically examined.

The raids in Cradley Heath and Halesowen were carried out simultaneously and resulted in the seizure of between 4,000-5,000 games and other digital media.

A number of suspects were arrested and released on Police bail pending further investigations.


HEXUS Forums :: 7 Comments

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I work in Brierley Hill that place is less than five minutes away, bet I know which market stand it was that got busted as well.
Its about time those pikeys got shut down. They have been doing this for at least 15 years…

Was it the council organising this raid ;)
Recovered from the premises were 10,000 blank discs and 30,000+ fraudulent software titles, including recent films and music such as High School Musical 3, Hancock and Mummy 3. That haul included at least 9,000 unlawfully copied discs containing videogame titles.

how long would 30000 discs take to copy?! :crazy:
glad they got taken down though :thumbsup:
not that long when they do a batch of 35 at a time….

so say they only had to do 1000 copies in time, say each one takes 10 minutes to do, thats 10,000 minutes (say 12,000 for ease of calculation) so that is 200 hours or 20 longish days
These guys had been reported so many times it was unreal. About blinking time :)