Stop more than 50 thousand illegal users of private paid platforms of IPTV and live streaming sites of the most famous television platforms. The order was made by the Catania Public Prosecutor's Office in the context of an investigation into television piracy with 21 suspects in 12 Italian cities - Catania, Messina, Siracusa, Cosenza, Alessandria, Napoli, Salerno, Reggio Emilia, Pisa, Lucca, Livorno and Bari – and searches and seizures by the Postal Police throughout the national territory of 13 control panels for illegal flows.
The investigation, according to the deputy prosecutor Sebastiano Ardita and the substitute Francesco Camerano, owners of the file, has identified a transnational criminal association that would have had monthly profits of six million euros per month.
The crimes contested, to varying degrees, are transnational criminal association aimed at broadcasting television schedules with conditional access, damage to information, data and computer programs, unauthorized access to a computer system, computer fraud.
The investigations, started by the Cyber Security Operations Centre of Catania with the direct coordination of the Postal Police Service of Rome and directed by the Catania DDA, have allowed us to outline “the existence of a criminal association organized in a hierarchical manner according to distinct and well-defined roles and with promoters distributed throughout the national territory and abroad, having as its purpose the constant distribution to a very high number of users at national and international level of live programming and on-demand content protected by television rights owned by the most well-known television platforms such as, for example, Sky, Dazn, Mediaset, Amazon Prime, Netflix, through the illegal IPTV system, with monthly profits of several million euros”.
Various profiles online advertising the “pezzotto”
The presence on various social platforms of channels, groups, accounts, forums, blogs and profiles advertising the sale, on the national territory, of streams, panels and monthly subscriptions for the illegal viewing of audiovisual content was also discovered.
. The CEO of Sky Italia, Andrea Duilio, expressed “full support to the police in their counter-action, which over the years has become increasingly valuable in ensuring legality, to protect all those who legitimately use their favorite content”.
“To counter this criminal phenomenon - he added - It is a commitment that involves us all and now, thanks to the new anti-piracy law, we can do it even more effectively." For the Federation for the protection of the audiovisual and multimedia content industries, the Catania police operation is “a hard blow to the criminal mentalities that manage illegal IPTV and illicit live streaming platforms whose revenues finance criminal acts”.
Article published on 19 December 2023 - 18:59
