A YouTube scammer has been sentenced to 5 years in prison after falsely claiming $23 million in royalties.
Targeting both independent and global superstars like Daddy Yankee and Prince Royce, Jose Teran was believed to have defrauded the website.
He even set up his own company, MediaMuv, and partnered with another to continue the ‘layered façade’.
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Occurring over a five-year period, Teran largely targeted Latino artists as he claimed the copyright on over 50,000 songs.
The fraudster would even upload MP3 recordings to YouTube, and then falsely claim the royalties with his business partner, Webster Batista Fernandez.
As the scam progressed, Teran founded his own company, MediaMuv, and hired co-conspirators to scour the site for songs that hadn’t been monetised yet.
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This allowed them to sign a contract with YouTube and use it’s content management system (CMS), to claim the copyright and resulting royalties.
They also agreed to a contract with AdRev, a rights management company, to assist in 'administrating the music that [they] fraudulently claimed to own'.
Whilst similar scams have apparently used YouTube to fraudulently claim copyright, Teran and MediaMuv were far more ambitious and often tried to claim ‘100 per cent of the royalties for master recordings or publishing’.
It was only when the company was investigated by the IRS in 2019, that scam came to light with Teran having set up multiple bank accounts under fake names.
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He would later plead guilty to 30 counts including wire fraud, transactional money laundering and aggravated identity theft.
According to an official press release, he admitted to conspiring with Batista to monetize music that he had 'no lawful rights to monetize or otherwise control'.
Having received an estimated $23 million (£18m) in ill-gotten funds from 2016 to 2021, Teran was sentenced to 70 months– just over 5 years in prison.
His business partner, Batista Fernandez, has now also plead guilty and will now be sentenced on August 5.
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The men have also been ordered to pay restitution to those affected by the complex fraud.
Downton Music Holdings, who own AdRev, have also given a statement about the case to Billboard.
It said that the company was ‘pleased by the latest developments’ after both defendants plead guilty and admitted their part in the ‘complex fraud scheme’.
Their spokesperson added: “This case sends a strong message to other potential bad actors that this kind of fraudulent activity in our industry will be investigated and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
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UNILAD has also reached out to YouTube for comment regarding the case.
Topics: Music, YouTube, True crime, US News