A new punch operation, called The Net, took place in Italy against actors of illegal IPTV streaming. Guardia di Finanza forces dismantled a vast network that supplied more than 500,000 subscribers spread across the country. Twenty people were indicted for counterfeiting. Their homes – spread across Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Campania and Calabria – were searched.
The police also got their hands on the administrator of “CyberGroup”, an ISP in Campania suspected of being one of the pillars of the technical dissemination of this kind of illegal flow.
In the same geographical region, they have also identified an entity responsible for collecting and invoicing pirate streams from the Sky channel.
Finally, they have indicted a person in Tuscany who illegally distributed pirated Sky streams using around 50 mobile devices.
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FAPAV, an Italian association of rights holders, is over the moon.
“Once again, operations of this type reveal the true dimensions of audiovisual piracy, a phenomenon still too underestimated by public opinion, but which is actually managed by real cybercriminals”, emphasizes Federico Bagnoli Rossi, its secretary general.
He warmly thanks the police for dismantling this “complex criminal network” and thus contribute to “the protection of an industrial sector, that of the audiovisual sector, fundamental for the economy and employment of our country”.
According to him, this economic sector would be hard hit by the pandemic and would begin a “restart phase”.
In recent years, the transalpine law enforcement agencies have stepped up actions against illegal streaming. By September 2020, they had taken down 58 streaming sites, and blocked 18 Telegram threads, in an operation called Evil Web. We also remember the dismantling of Xtream Codes in September 2019, which provided pirate groups with IPTV stream administration tools.
Sources : Guardia di Finanza, FAPAV