In recent years, a new type of piracy is progressing: the IPTV boxes. The latter offer, for a few tens of dollars per month, unlimited access to content on demand and television channels whose subscription normally costs much more. Of course, the money paid to the pirates remains in the hands of the latter who have absolutely no connection with the rights holders. And buying and using these cases is therefore strictly illegal.
Huge Punch Operation Ends Important IPTV Pirate Service
These pirate IPTV boxes nevertheless enjoy an unprecedented popularity: they are found on dubious sites of the net, and even now in some markets in France, in the largest cities. A progression that makes the fight against these services a growing priority. A task that requires international police co-operation, since hackers often run their operations in several countries to better muddy the tracks.
Which does not mean that they can escape justice indefinitely. Thus, TorrentFreak reports that an unprecedented punching operation has just taken place in Europe to end one of these services. The survey dates back to 2015, and the service in question was declined in about twenty sites. The heart of the operations was in Spain and Gibraltar.
It all began four years ago when rights holders in the British Premier League filed a complaint against a website based in Malaga and offering subscription offers providing access to many premium services. In all, this service provided access to more than 800 channels and video-on-demand services. The price of the offers ranged from 40 $ per quarter to 460 $ for the longest duration available.
The hackers' lifestyle alerted the police
The Spanish police said: "The strategy of the defendants was to use a multitude of servers and change them periodically, gradually creating new web pages to form a network, which, on paper, did not maintain links. In this way, the goal was not to be detected by the national police and to be able to continue to profit from the crime ".
And add: "after a thorough investigation, the police discovered a link between holding [based in Spain and Gibraltar, ed] and the bank accounts of beneficiaries of subscriptions, still belonging to members of the organization" . The members of this network had legal windows allowing them to launder this money. But their lifestyle ended up alerting the authorities.
The police eventually organized 14 simultaneous raids, including 8 in Spain (Malaga, Madrid, Alicante), 4 in Denmark and two in the United Kingdom. Thus 5 people were arrested and must answer for intellectual property and money laundering. 10 other defendants testified before the police. 66 servers were disconnected ending the service for some of the users. But the police think they can completely stop their operations having identified 11 farms containing more than 44 servers.
The police estimate that the managers of the operation have made a profit of about 8 million euros since 2013, including 1.6 million dollars redirected to companies abroad.
