Italy busts €300 million streaming piracy ring

Police uncover piracy system selling illegal streaming access for as low as €40

The Netflix logo is pictured on a television in this illustration photograph taken in Encinitas, California, US, January 18, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Italy's financial police said on Friday they had busted a sophisticated streaming piracy network that caused roughly €300 million ($348 million) in damages to rights holders such as Sky, DAZN, Netflix, Disney+ and Spotify.

The operation targeted previously unseen technology built around an application called CINEMAGOAL, which connected users' devices to foreign servers that illegally decrypted streaming content, the Guardia di Finanza police said.

Virtual machines operated around the clock on Italian soil, capturing and retransmitting access codes from legitimate subscriptions registered to fictitious account holders every three minutes, police added.

The system bypassed streaming platforms' security checks and did not require a connection directly associated with a specific IP address, making it harder to detect users. Subscriptions were offered for €40 to €130 per year.

Prosecutors in Bologna, working with EU judicial cooperation body Eurojust, secured the seizure of foreign servers storing decryption data and the application's source code, with parallel operations carried out in France and Germany, police said.

The Guardia di Finanza also uncovered the use of traditional illegal streaming devices, commonly known in Italy as "pezzotto", and will issue fines for 1,000 identified pirate system users ranging from €154 to €5,000.