Italian authorities shut down €3bn-a-year pirate TV ring

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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. 

Authorities estimate the operation generated revenues of roughly €250mn a month, or €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.

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.

In Italy, the top Serie A football league and broadcasters with the rights to its matches have been up in arms about 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, and other forums, while subscribers paid roughly €10 per month for access to a full package of pirated content from major streaming services.

In their raids this week, authorities said they 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 along with their foreign counterparts, while additional equipment was found in the UK and the Netherlands.

Additional reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi