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A piracy ring that gave 22mn subscribers in Europe cheap access to content stolen from international streaming services has been shut down by Italian authorities after a two-year investigation.
The criminal enterprise used a complex international IT system to “capture and resell” live programming and other on-demand content from companies including sports broadcaster DAZN, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Paramount, Sky and Disney+, prosecutors said in a statement on Wednesday.
Eurojust, the European Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, estimated that the operation — one of the world’s largest illegal streaming services — generated revenues of roughly €3bn a year and caused combined damages of more than €10bn to the affected broadcast companies.
“The rate of profit you get from these illegal activities with lower risk is equivalent to that of cocaine trafficking,” Francesco Curcio, the criminal prosecutor who led the investigation, told reporters.
Almost 300 officers of Italy’s postal police searched 89 sites in 15 regions of Italy in co-ordinated raids on Tuesday, according to prosecutors, while their international counterparts searched 14 locations in the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Romania, Croatia and China.
It was the largest operation ever conducted in Italy or internationally against audiovisual piracy, the Italian statement said.
The two suspected ringleaders of the enterprise — which operated through a “top-down organisational model, characterised by the presence of associates who had distinct and well-defined roles” — were based in the Netherlands, with another 11 people arrested in Croatia, according to Italian authorities.
Luigi De Siervo, chief executive of Italy’s Serie A football league, praised the shutdown of the ring as “a crucial step” in the struggle against content theft.
“We are relentlessly fighting a battle of cops and robbers in which these criminals resort to the most sophisticated technologies to evade controls,” De Servio said.
“Piracy is not just a crime, but a direct attack on all honest people in this country, on investments and on the quality of content that fans and enthusiasts deserve to see,” he added.
Live sports streaming services are increasingly concerned about the impact of piracy, which they say costs their industry tens of billions of dollars a year.
DAZN and broadcaster beIN announced last year that they were backing a new global task force — and working more closely with Interpol and Europol — to crack down on streaming services piracy.
Italy’s Serie A and broadcasters with the rights to its matches have also been pushing for stronger action against illegal streaming of games.
Italian authorities this year launched a special initiative, Piracy Shield, to attempt to crack down on illegal streaming of live matches in real time. Under the scheme, Italy’s telecoms regulator is obliged to block within 30 minutes any IP address that broadcasters report as suspected of disseminating pirated signals of their games.
However, the initiative has been mired in controversy and accused of causing disruption through the blocking of unrelated sites, including Google Drive in one incident last month.
This week’s investigation has involved a longer-term, more widespread operation, involving piracy of all types of broadcast content, not just sports.
Italian authorities say the illegal service was advertised via social media platforms including Telegram as well as other forums, while subscribers paid roughly €10 a month for access to a full package of pirated content from major streaming services, including movies and serials, with more than 2,500 channels.
In their raids this week, authorities said they had discovered servers in Romania and Hong Kong from which signals captured from satellite television services were transmitted via the internet to subscribers throughout Europe.
Nine servers were shut down on Tuesday by Italian postal police and their foreign counterparts, while additional equipment was found in the UK and the Netherlands.
Additional reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi
