[MovedGoalPosts]

To clear up a misconception here. The simple act of reselling of a broadband connection is not illegal as such, after all there are many legal resellers of such services.

When reselling is against the terms and conditions of the ISP, then it is a breach of contract by the reseller. The ISP is thus entitled to cancel the cotnract, and seek damages if it wishes. That is a civil law matter.

The web hosting of "free" servers is also an area that would come under scrutiny within the Ts & Cs, as a breach of contract rather than criminal law.

The criminal illegality bit will depend on how the reselling of the connection has been stated. We do not know what has been said to the pensioners. If he is selling a "share" of his connnection, that could be a reasonable statement. If he is selling a minimum speed, or bandwidth, that would be far more risky.

Now the real debate kickc in as to if he is not entitled to resell, as that is against his contract, does the act of reselling count as fraud - I suppose yes. It's got to be a little bit like handling stolen goods, you are not entitled to the item so making money from it is theft. Whether it is that serious that one could argue the cost being sold are so high relative to what is on offer as to be a form of extortion, I doubt we can currently say. We don't know how many are on this connection. One or two sharers might not be bad but 10, must be?

OK so he is offering some form of support service to thise pensioners. Nothing wrong with that. Indeed if he wishes he is entitled to charge somethign for that service. Again the amount that is charged woudl be the aspect of scrutiny.

Finally there is the aspect of the income from this. It would be regarded as taxable, so if it is not declared it is a form of tax evasion. We don't know that this is or is not happening and it would be unreasonable for us to make any accusation without more facts. That many (in all walks of lfe) no doubt do look on little bits of extra income as their own without declaring it is irrelevant as any defence or justification.

So what should really have happened is that each has their own direct connection with an ISP and then a reasonable charge is levied for support services.