In December 2011, the City of London Police formally requested that MasterCard, PayPal and Visa cease providing payment facilities to 28 websites that sell copyright infringing music.  All three services complied immediately with the request.
The notice came as part of the ongoing cooperation between the payment services industry, IFPI and the City of London Police, designed to proactively target unlicensed download stores that sell cut-price unlicensed music worldwide.  The stores are based in Russia and Ukraine, where enforcement of copyright law is historically weak, but their websites are in English and feature repertoire from independent and major international record companies.  

The other stakeholders in the payment providers programme, who were not providing services to these 28 sites, were put on notice that they are operating illegally and asked to withhold services if approached by them.

PayPal has also frozen all accounts associated with the 24 sites that it had been providing services for.   The City of London Police is working towards the recovery of these assets and investigations are ongoing.

Jeremy Banks,  IFPI’s anti-piracy director, says:  “This is the latest milestone in our joint campaign with the City of London Police and payment providers to combat criminal websites that sell copyright infringing music without any payment to artists and record companies.  Those running these websites hoped that by being based in Russia and Ukraine they could operate with impunity, they were wrong.”