Italian authorities have dismantled this Friday an organization that offered pirate access to audiovisual content on platforms such as Amazon Prime or Netflix and that had more than 900,000 users, also abroad.
The Prosecutor’s Office of the city of Catania (south), which has carried out the investigation, has ordered the arrest of eight people in Italy and other unspecified countries, all accused of the crimes of criminal association and computer fraud, among others.
The operation, a branch of another large-scale one from 2022, has confirmed “the existence of a criminal association organized in a hierarchical manner” and with “responsible parties” in Catania, Rome, Brescia (north), and abroad.
In a statement, the investigators point out that this “clan” distributed content from platforms such as Sky, Dazn, Mediaset, Amazon Prime or Netflix to a “very high” number of users through an illegal IPTV (television over internet protocol) system that provided “estimated monthly earnings in the millions of euros.”
The people arrested have been considered as “a kind of pinnacle of the Italian illegal ‘streaming’ market’ who, in addition to directing the organization, decided the price of subscriptions, the suspension of the service or the way it was distributed.
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Everything managed through numerous servers of foreign companies, fictitious identities, and with encrypted communications.
The dimension of this network is “huge”, according to the Italian authorities, since during the months in which it was investigated it obtained profits of nearly 10 million euros and caused audiovisual platforms to lose more than 30 million euros monthly.
But also because the content it offered represented 70% of the illegal Italian ‘streaming’ and had more than 900,000 users, according to the Prosecutor’s Office.
