PHILADELPHIA—Over 100 officers, including FBI agents as well as Pennsylvania and Philadelphia police, raided National A-1 Advertising (home of HotMovies.com) at 9am this morning, AVN has learned.
Armed with search warrants, the officers detained about 120 employees and released them before noon Eastern time. HotMovies.com's sites are temporarily down while the agencies continue an all-day search of the company's premises, according to James Cybert, Director of Marketing for HotMovies.com.
Cybert is unaware of the nature of the investigation, since the agents refused to show him the contents of the search warrants, but company president Richard Cohen is apparently still in the building with the officers.
Some of the sites affected by the raid are HotMovies.com, HomegrownVOD.com, AVNVOD.com, ElegantAngelVOD.com, ExtremeVOD.com, GayMovies.com, GroobyVOD.com, EdPowersVOD.com, BuckAngelVOD.com and more than a dozen others. As this is written, none of those sites could be accessed, presumably because they are all whitelabeled VOD sites operated by HotMovies.
More details to come.
UPDATE - 10:15am
HotMovies.com Director of Marketing James Cybert posted the following comment to his Facebook page at approximately 10am EDT.
“Thx everyone. still no new news. waiting on the agents to leave so we can asses the situation. still thinking we'll be back online late today/tonight.”
