Dawn raid on allofmp3.com's UK agent

Naughty voucher-selling must stop

22 May 2007 9:38 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

A British man has been arrested and computer equipment and papers seized after police raided a private address in Bow, London.

The man was allegedly in the process of selling £10 vouchers that allowed downloads from the illegal Russian music website allofmp3.com.

The vouchers, apparently for sale on sites like eBay, contained a code that would let customers download tracks.

The arrested man was allegedly sending the money raised from the voucher sales back to Russia via off-shore accounts.

The site had resorted to voucher-based payments as it recently had payment facilities suspended by PayPal and all major credit card companies in an effort to try and stop it trading.

allofmp3.com was at one time the second most popular music download service in the UK offering songs for around 15 cents and albums for as little as a dollar.

The site had always claimed it was above-board touting some loophole in Russian law, but international investigations revealed that no royalties were being paid back to record companies and that the site was in fact breaking the law.

allofmp3.com currently faces a variety of legal actions, court injunctions and an ongoing criminal proceeding in Russia.

Full tags

Biz, allofmp3, Music downloads, Websites