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Swedish court jails man for porn bills

TT/The Local
TT/The Local - [email protected]
Swedish court jails man for porn bills
More than 4000 alleged that they received bills in the case. Photo: Jessica Gow/TT

A 43-year-old man has been sentenced to eight months in prison by a Swedish court, after he sent out thousands of bills to purported porn surfers.

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The sentence, which an appeals court reduced significantly from the original judgment handed out by a district court in Malmö, also saw the man absolved of a charge of aggravated extortion.

The court of appeals convicted the accused, who is based in Skåne, southern Sweden, of aggravated accounting fraud, violations of Sweden’s Personal Data Act, unlawful coercion and aggravated libel. He was, however, cleared entirely of the first point of the original prosecution: aggravated extortion.

His eight-month sentence is a significant reduction from the original two and a half years’ jail time dealt out initially by the district court.

“This has to be seen as a monumental fiasco for the prosecution,” defence lawyer Lars Kruse told news agency TT.

Almost 4000 people alleged that they had received bills for downloading pornographic films to their mobile phone from a website controlled by the 43-year-old. The prosecution claimed that they were threatened with being exposed on the internet as porn consumers if they did not pay.

According to the appeals court verdict however, the prosecution failed to prove that no agreement existed between the plaintiffs and the business, and the court has therefore judged that the films may in fact have been downloaded from the company's website. In that scenario, it is not possible to sentence the 43-year-old and his associates for extortion.

In the cases where the appeals court judged the letters to be formulated in a criminal manner, the company was convicted of illegal coercion. Those cases were far from the majority of the letters however, something the defence celebrated.

“I am very happy. My client has been cleared of almost 4000 charges of aggravated extortion and attempted aggravated extortion,” lawyer Kruse said.

The business owner has on the other hand been convicted of breach of Sweden’s Personal Data Act, after he published a list of almost 2800 names of individuals he claimed did not pay for their porn purchases. He has also been convicted for aggravated slander, after publishing the name and image of a 19-year-old woman in relation to porn consumption, as well as other derogatory information.

Four other defendants were handed suspended sentences by the appeals court for charges including unlawful coercion, while a further defendant was cleared completely.

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