Huge Pirate Streaming Platform Taken Offline and Operators Arrested

• The Europol has arrested 11 individuals who are linked with a massive pirate streaming IPTV platform.
• The police have seized cash and items worth many millions of Euros, and they took down the servers and 50 IP addresses.
• The particular platform was serving over two million subscribers with 40,000 TV channels and movies.

The Europol has announced the dismantling of a pirate streaming service serving over two million subscribers from all over the world. The arrest operation simultaneously took place on June 3, 2020, in Spain, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, resulting in the arrest of 11 individuals. Another 16 people are being interrogated to determine their involvement in the scheme, but the leader of the operation has already been identified and busted. The house raids and searches resulted in the seizure of €4.8 million, the freezing of eleven bank accounts that hold €1.1 million, and the taking down of 50 IP addresses.

The investigation on the illegal service started in 2019 by the Spanish National Police (Policía Nacional). After realizing the magnitude of the platform’s operation, as well as its global reach, Europol and Eurojust joined the investigation and helped involve the law enforcement authorities in Belgium, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, France, Italy, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Europol’s Intellectual Property Crime Coordinated Coalition held the coordination role in the operation, while also involving Europol’s financial and economic crime experts.

The pirating streaming service was illegally re-broadcasting over 40,000 TV channels, films, documentaries, series, and other media hosted on a network of servers spread across the continent. In total, Europol estimates that the operators of the platform have made a profit of around €15 million, which was reflected in the items (sports cars, luxury watches) that the involved persons were found to be possessing, as well as the properties where they lived. Of course, everything, including cryptocurrencies and electronic equipment has been seized now, and all of the network’s supporting infrastructure has been taken down.

Pirate IPTV platforms like the one that has been dismantled by Europol are just too big to fly under the radar for long. We have seen this happen recently in Bulgaria, where 17 simultaneous raids resulted in the crackdown of a platform that served 30,000 subscribers. It is easily understood that the size and importance of the most recent bust are beyond any comparison. For now, no specific service names have been revealed, so we don’t know which IPTV platforms have been taken offline as a result. Surely, this must cause a disruption in the IPTV service field.