Jail for satellite card magician

Mark Elsdon, 39, from Llandudno in Wales has been a magician and magic trick author for the past fifteen years and yet not even his magical powers could prevent him from being sent to jail for selling satellite cards to pubs, which enabled them to show Premier League football matches in their bars without having to pay the huge subscriptions that they would normally have to pay.

He is the first person to be convicted on this type of charge, when he admitted to eight charges; he actually supplied the cards to at least seventeen pubs in the North Wales area. The cards came from Greece and North Africa, where the way that football is managed is clearly different to the UK.

This follows a long investigation by the trading standards department, but Elsdon states that he believed that they were legal and that he had even contacted the European Satellite Television Association (ESTA) who he claims told him that the cards were ok to be used in the UK. He will be sentenced in April, but the maximum sentence for this type of offence is ten years in prison.

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