This tactic is not new, and has worked in the past. I'm thinking of a piracy crackdown about 20 years ago. Back then it was a network of dial-up bulletin boards, and people who would commit phone fraud to upload and download data, operating as couriers, in groups. The boards would often fun their hardware through credit card fraud, and many of them made money selling tapes full of pirated material. The crackdown involved raiding the boards, getting the user details, tracking their phone numbers, and getting various people raided in the various countries. A lot of the time the cases would collapse in court on various technicalities, but it would be a year before people would get their seized computer equipment back.