What to know about the cable piracy case against popular YouTuber ‘Omi in a Hellcat’

This week, a popular Philadelphia-area YouTuber known as “Omi in a Hellcat” was sentenced to more than five years in federal prison for running one of the most successful TV piracy schemes ever prosecuted by federal officials.

Bill Omar Carrasquillo pleaded guilty to charges including copyright infringement and tax fraud last year. His punishment was announced Tuesday and included an order to forfeit more than $30 million in assets. In court, Carrasquillo apologized to his family, employees, and the companies he scammed, and said he “didn’t know the significance of this crime” until he was arrested by the FBI.

“Thirty million dollars is a lot of money [but] tangible objects aren’t everything,” U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III said. “You have a large following and there may be people who think if you can get away with it, they can too.”

Here’s a look at the case, Carrasquillo’s rags-to-riches story and what landed him in prison.

Carrasquillo, 36, is the man behind the popular YouTube channel “Omi in a Hellcat,” where he shares slickly produced videos set to hip-hop beats in which he shows off his collection of diamond-encrusted bling, his spacious Swedesboro home, and a fleet of 57 high-end sports and luxury cars parked out front. His YouTube channel has attracted more than 1 million views and 800,000 followers.

Carrasquillo grew up in North Philadelphia and was raised as one of 38 children. In his videos, he’s often spoken about his troubled upbringing. His mother died of an overdose. He’s described his father as a drug kingpin who taught him how to cook crack-cocaine at age 12. As a child, Carrasquillo bounced between the care of relatives, foster parents and his father when he was out of jail. He has said that at one point he was staying with a caretaker who had him committed to a mental health institution solely for access to prescription narcotics that his guardian planned to later sell on the streets.

It’s no wonder, his attorney told the judge during the sentencing Tuesday, that Carrasquillo got into drug dealing in his teenage years and beyond and spent time in and out of jail before swearing off the trade in his late 20s and turning his attention to the business that would eventually land him in federal prison.

Carrasquillo was indicted in September 2021 for running a multimillion-dollar business known at various points as Gears TV and Gears Reloaded through which he and two other defendants opened dozens of accounts with cable companies like Comcast and Verizon FiOS, hacked the encrypted cable boxes, and then streamed and resold the copyrighted content transmitted through them, like on-demand movies and TV shows, to their own subscribers over the internet for as low as $15 a month.

So-called illegal IPTV services — or internet protocol television — have grown into a $1 billion-a-year industry in the U.S., according to recent studies, with as many as 7% of North American households subscribing through hardware widely available online and preloaded with apps to access copyrighted content.

But Carrasquillo’s crime is one of the most brazen and successful cable TV piracy schemes ever prosecuted by the Justice Department — attracting more than 100,000 subscribers and generating more than $34 million in profits before it was shut down by federal authorities in 2019.

In addition to the five-and-a-half-year prison term, Bartle, the judge, ordered Carrasquillo to forfeit more than $30 million in assets — the money he personally took home from his business — as well as pay nearly $11 million in restitution to the cable companies he pirated. Because Carrasquillo failed to report to the IRS any of the money he or his business was making between 2016 and 2019, he owes an additional $5.7 million in back taxes.

Money to cover some of these debts will come from selling off assets that federal authorities seized during a 2019 raid. They froze multiple bank accounts opened by Carrasquillo and his codefendants and seized Carrasquillo’s collection of Lamborghinis, Porsches, Bentleys, and McLarens and a portfolio of more than four dozen properties he’d amassed across Philadelphia and its suburbs.

His Swedesboro mansion is also being sold off as well. He told the judge Tuesday he and his family plan to move to smaller home they are building in Upland Borough, Delaware County.

“I’m only guilty of making money,” Carrasquillo said in a video posted at the time of the raids under the title “THE FBI SEIZED EVERYTHING FROM ME.” “I ain’t guilty of nothing else.”

He’s said he’s since had a change of heart, admitting to his YouTube audience — and in court Tuesday — that he’d committed several felony crimes

“It just sucks,” he said in a video last year. “It sucks to lose my house, to lose properties, money, all my cars, my jewelry. It’s an embarrassment.”

The judge gave Carrasquillo until May 8 to begin serving his sentence. Until then, he remains free on bail and, so far, he seems to be taking his looming incarceration well.

Prosecutors had sought to imprison him for more than a decade, and in an Instagram post after the hearing he said a sentence of less than half of that was a good outcome.

Prison, he quipped, “may be a salvation for my fat ass to lose some weight anyway.”