Italy busts piracy network that stole €300 million from streamers

Italy’s financial police said they dismantled a streaming-piracy operation built less like a password-sharing scheme and more like a moving digital factory, with virtual machines in Italy constantly refreshing access codes to keep illegal subscriptions alive. Guardia di Finanza said the network used an application called CINEMAGOAL to connect users’ devices to foreign servers that illegally decrypted content from services including Sky, DAZN, Netflix, Disney+ and Spotify.

Investigators said the setup relied on fictitious account holders and virtual machines that ran continuously, capturing and retransmitting access codes every three minutes. That design let the service survive normal platform checks, avoided ties to a specific IP address and made end users harder to identify. Authorities estimated the ring caused about €300 million in losses to rights holders, underscoring how piracy has evolved from crude credential theft into a more industrialized infrastructure business.

The illegal service was sold for between €40 and €130 a year, a fraction of what consumers would pay for multiple legal streaming packages. Prosecutors in Bologna worked with Eurojust to seize foreign servers that stored decryption data and the application’s source code, while parallel actions were carried out in France and Germany. Police also said the case exposed the continuing reach of older illegal set-top-box services in Italy, known as pezzotto, which remain part of the same wider black market for television access.

Guardia di Finanza said 1,000 identified users of the illegal system now face fines ranging from €154 to €5,000. That enforcement mix, targeting both operators and customers, reflects a broader European strategy: cut off the technical backbone, not just the retail layer. By taking control of servers, code and cross-border hosting, prosecutors are treating piracy as a digital supply chain that can be disrupted only through coordinated action across jurisdictions.

The Italian case fits a pattern European investigators have been warning about for months. Europol said in November 2024 that authorities across Europe dismantled another illegal streaming network linked to 102 suspects and 11 arrests, with access to more than 2,500 TV channels and over 22 million users worldwide. Taken together, the operations show that illegal IPTV is no longer a marginal copyright nuisance. It is a transnational criminal infrastructure, built to monetize subscriptions at scale and resilient enough to force police, courts and rights holders into a long campaign against a constantly adapting market.