The International Criminal Police Organization headquarters, known as Interpol (Photo by OLIVIER … [+]
AFP via Getty ImagesEuropean law enforcement has shut down one of the world’s largest illegal streaming sites, which had more 22 million users worldwide.
Led by Italy’s Postal and Cybersecurity Police Service, Operation Taken Down targeted an massive infrastructure scattered across the globe, using the illegal Internet Protocol Television system.
The organization operated a number of live-streaming websites, although these have not been named. They were offering on-demand content from well-known national and international television platforms, including Sky, Mediaset, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Paramount and Disney+.
The sites also offered more than 2,500 live television channels, including sports broadcasters.
The services were advertised on social media platforms, including Telegram with subscribers paying around €10 a month.
The investigation, which involved law enforcement authorities across Europe as well as Europol and Eurojust, targeted 102 suspects, with 11 people arrested. The two suspected ringleaders were based in the Netherlands.
And, said Eurojust, the suspects were pulling in more than €250 million a month.
To evade the authorities, they allegedly used encrypted messaging services to communicate, along with false identities to register phone numbers, credit cards, server rentals and television subscriptions.
“The postal police tracked down nine servers in Romania and Hong Kong through which the pirated audiovisual signal was broadcast throughout Europe, which they proceeded to turn off in collaboration with the local police forces,” said Italy’s Postal and Cybersecurity Police Service.
“Furthermore, three senior administrators and 80 control panels for streaming flows for the various IPTV channels were identified in England and Holland.”
In all, around 30 servers and 270 IPTV devices were seized and 100 domains taken down. More than 560 resellers were identified and various drugs and weapons seized, along with around €1.6 million in cryptocurrency and €40,000 in cash.
The action has been welcomed by the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance, which supported the operation.
“The scale of these multi-jurisdictional law enforcement actions highlights the considerable challenge our industry faces when dealing with such sophisticated international pirate networks,” said co-president Mark Mulready.
“We will continue to closely collaborate with law enforcement agencies in Europe and beyond to enable them to successfully identify, investigate and prosecute large-scale cross-border pirate networks.”
According to a study last year by the European Union Intellectual Property Office, TV content is the most pirated type of content in the EU, accounting for nearly half of all piracy. Piracy of live sports events, it found, was on the rise, up 30% between 2021 and 2022.
Worldwide, according to consultancy Kearney and anti-piracy analyst Muso, illegal streaming is on the rise, with visits to unlicensed global video content sites increasing to around 141 billion in 2023, up 12% since 2019.
