Imagine enjoying all the football and premieres for just 40 euros a year, with the peace of mind that a sophisticated system and payments in cryptocurrencies make you completely invisible. That tranquility has just suddenly vanished for many users of the Cinemagoal network that has been dismantled by the Italian authorities. The biggest risk is no longer that the screen goes black in the middle of the game, but rather receiving a notification in your mailbox with a fine of up to four figures.
what has happened. Through what was baptized as Operation “Tutto Chiaro”, the Italian Guardia di Finanza has managed to dismantle the technological infrastructure behind Cinemagoal. More than a hundred searches have been carried out in Italy and key servers located in France and Germany have been seized. But what is striking about the case is that they are not only persecuting those responsible for the network, but they are tracking and identifying the subscribers of the service, who are receiving fines ranging from 154 to 5,000 euros.
Why is it important. Italy is one of the toughest countries against the broadcast of matches and content without a license; It is not content with dismantling the infrastructure, but is going after the final link that feeds the business: the users. It is a war that they have been fighting for years, even leading to prison sentences. Although in Spain it has not gone as far as that, LaLiga has followed in Italy’s footsteps with the massive blocking of IPs, also affecting legitimate companies and services that have nothing to do with the distribution of unauthorized content.
This is how Cinemagoal worked. The network did not broadcast video via IPTV, but rather used virtual machines that operated 24/7, maintaining open sessions on services such as Netflix, DAZN, Sky, Disney+ or Spotify through legal subscriptions registered in the name of false identities. Instead of copying and broadcasting the audiovisual content, these machines extracted the keys or authorization tokens from the official sessions every three minutes and sent them in real time to the application installed on the clients’ devices.
Through this system, users downloaded the video directly from the platforms’ official servers, which completely hidden their IP addresses and made Piracy Shield, the Italian platform against the dissemination of unauthorized content, blind. The service cost between 40 and 130 euros per year and was distributed by more than 70 resellers in Italy, who paid preferably in cryptocurrencies or through foreign accounts to evade tracking.
For the users. Cinemagoal customers believed they were protected by anonymity, but the police have managed to identify at least 1,000 users by cross-referencing data. To find them, investigators analyzed customer records seized from more than 70 resellers operating in Italy, tracked payment histories and activity logs (logs) hosted on the application’s own servers.
The minimum fine is 154 euros, which will be for users who were simply viewing content. Those who had the “fictitious subscriptions from which the authentication tokens were extracted”, that is, those who redistributed the content, will have to pay up to 5,000 euros.
300 million. The Italian authorities estimate that the damage caused by this platform reaches 300 million euros in subscriptions. This is what is known as lost profits, that is, the money that platforms stop earning due to unauthorized content. However, their way of doing the math assumes that the hacking user would have paid 100% if they did not have the illegal option: it is a fallacy and an unrealistic metric of losses.
Image | with Gemini
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