Julio Iglesias and other singers lost millions of dollars for their songs
Julio Iglesias, the most famous artist and singer who received immense fortune is being victimized of biggest music scam of all time.
Great Latin music artists such as Julio Iglesias , Daddy Yankee, Anuel AA, Prince Royce and Don Omar, among many others, have been victims of the biggest theft of ‘royalties’ on YouTube since the online video platform was created in 2005.
Julio Iglesias and other singers lost millions of dollars for their songs.
Two men from Phoenix, who have already gone down in history, would have defrauded them of a total of 23 million dollars.
Julio Iglesias, victim of the biggest robbery in history
According to ‘Billboard’, the thieves, José ‘Chenel‘ Medina Terán and Webster Batista, created a media company called MediaMuv with which they claimed to own more than 50,000 copyrights to songs and compositions by these singers.
In order for the company of these two thieves to be able to claim these copyrights and collect royalties through YouTube’s content identification system, the fraudulent company partnered with AdRev, an external company that has access to YouTube’s CMS and marketing tools, content identification, and that helps artists manage their digital copyrights
This is how they deceived YouTube and hundreds of singers
This company created several false documents in order to prove ownership of the claimed music to AdRev .
Thanks to this MediaMuv could collect the ‘royalties’ of the songs for copyright, but also the founders of the company had direct access to the YouTube CMS so that they could comfortably claim the copyright themselves.
None of the singers who were scammed realized the deception.
They were losing millions of dollars. It was the representative of Puerto Rican Anuel AA who discovered the scam when he was alerted by Billboard.
However, after a while, the IRS, the US Treasury, did not balance the accounts of these two thieves and began an investigation.
His radical change of life set off all the alarms.
High-priced houses, luxury sports cars and jewelry were bought for thousands of zeros.
To date, Webster Batista has pleaded guilty, while his partner, Medina Terán, is awaiting trial.
Both entrepreneurs have shown that it is not necessary to be a brilliant mind to steal copyright from artists and collect royalties.
It seems that these types of scams are more common than it seems.
Music professionals working in digital rights management have come across more than one.
Although they say that the way Teran and Batista acted “was particularly brazen, both because of the tens of millions of dollars that the IRS says they stole from Latino artists and the way they did it.”
“ It was almost impossible for us to know that we had been robbed ,” says Edgar Rueda, manager of the Latin gangs Samuray, Celso Piña and Los Chicos de Barrio.
They lost access to the CMS and had no control over the actual earnings.
“MediaMuv stole something like $65,000 from Samuraï, but we didn’t even know that money existed.”
YouTube is completely silent for now, while AdRev has issued a statement saying it has “fully cooperated with the investigation into this matter by the IRS and the Arizona District Attorney’s office as set forth in the indictment. This matter is ongoing, the sentencing of Webster Batista Fernández and the trial of José Medina Terán are still pending. AdRev employees may be called as witnesses at trial or sentencing. As such, AdRev will not publicly comment on any facts related to the indictment until the conclusion of the criminal matter.”
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