Published 3 days ago • loading... • Updated 2 days ago
Italy Busts €300 Million Streaming Piracy Ring
On Friday, Italy's financial police busted the CINEMAGOAL streaming piracy network, which caused $348 million in damages to rights holders including Sky, DAZN, Netflix, Disney, and Spotify.
Virtual machines operated around the clock on Italian soil, capturing and retransmitting access codes from legitimate subscriptions every three minutes to fuel the illicit operation.
Prosecutors in Bologna, working with Eurojust, secured seizures of foreign servers and the application's source code, while parallel operations were carried out in France and Germany.
The Guardia also uncovered traditional illegal streaming devices known as "pezzotto" and will issue fines for 1,000 identified users ranging from €154 to €5,000.
Bypassing security checks, the system used fictitious account holders and avoided detection by not requiring connections tied to specific IP addresses, making enforcement difficult.
The investigation of the Guardia di Finanza of Ravenna, coordinated by the Public Prosecutor's Office of Bologna, has allowed to bring to light a new system to access the contents of the digital platforms in an illegal way: "On the territory there was that distributed the product and the various packages offered"