Victims of ’Porn Troll’ Lawyer Urged to Seek Restitution Dollars

As Minnesota “porn troll” lawyer Paul Hansmeier awaits a June 4 sentencing date, when if prosecutors get their way he will be looking at spending the next 12 years of his life behind bars, as AVN.com reported, he now may also face paying his victims back for the money that they paid him—to the tune of millions of dollars. Those same prosecutors on Monday called for victims of what they called Hansmeier’s "sham pornography film copyright infringement" cases, to seek to get back the money they paid him, according to a report by The Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Hansmeier and his former law partner John Steele ran a scheme in which they would upload porn videos to torrent sites, where they could track users who downloaded the files, as AVN.com reported. They would then threaten the users with lawsuits for supposedly downloading copyrighted material, counting on the victims’ sense of awkwardness over viewing porn to prevent them from contesting the cases and simply paying up a sum of “settlement” money. As the scheme continued, Hansmeier and Steele graduated to producing their own porn videos, which they would also upload and track. The lawyers would ask for “settlements” that were small enough that it was more economical for victims to simply pay up rather than fight the bogus lawsuits, according to the Star-Tribune report.  Though Hansmeier pleaded guilty, he subsequently took illegal measures, including money laundering, to conceal the full extent of his crimes and the money he made from them, prosecutors alleged in asking for the sentence of 12-1/2 years. “Hansmeier was greedy, arrogant, devious, mendacious, and consistently positioned other people to be damaged by his conduct, even as he enjoyed the proceeds of the scheme he orchestrated,” prosecutors told a judge. They said that victims who choose to seek restitution from Hansmeier would not be publicly identified. KMSP TV Vimeo Screen Capture