Italy cracks down on a €300 million streaming ring
Italy’s financial police said on Friday that they had caught a clever network of people stealing streaming services. The network had cost rights holders like Sky, DAZN, Netflix, Disney+, and Spotify about €300 million ($348 million).
The operation focused on technology that had never been seen before. It was based on an app called CINEMAGOAL and connected users’ devices to foreign servers that illegally decrypted streaming material, according to the Guardia di Finanza.
According to the police, virtual machines in Italy worked around the clock, stealing and sending access codes from real subscriptions registered to fake account users every three minutes.
The system got around the security checks of streaming sites and didn’t need a connection directly linked to a specific IP address, which made it harder to find users. Prices for subscriptions ranged from €40 to €130 per year.
Police in France and Germany said that actions were going on at the same time while prosecutors in Bologna worked with Eurojust to secure the seizure of foreign servers that held decryption data and the app’s source code.
The Guardia di Finanza also found that illegal streaming devices, called “pezzotto” in Italy, were being used. They will fine 1,000 people who were found to be using pirate systems between €154 and €5,000.
