Italy busts €300 million streaming piracy network

Italian authorities have dismantled a large-scale streaming piracy operation that allegedly caused around €300 million in losses to major rights holders, including Netflix Inc, Walt Disney Co, Spotify Technology SA, Sky and DAZN, Italian financial police said on May 22.

The operation was centred on a sophisticated system built around an application called CINEMAGOAL, which investigators say enabled users to access pirated streams by connecting devices to foreign servers that illegally decrypted paid content, Caliber.Az reports, citing foreign media.

According to the Guardia di Finanza, the network used continuously running virtual machines located in Italy to capture and retransmit access credentials from legitimate subscriptions registered under fictitious accounts, refreshing the data every few minutes.

Authorities said the system was designed to bypass platform security checks and avoid reliance on identifiable IP-based connections, making detection more difficult.

Subscriptions to the illicit service were reportedly sold for between €40 and €130 per year, significantly undercutting official streaming packages.

Investigators in Bologna, working with the EU judicial cooperation body Eurojust, also seized servers located abroad that allegedly contained decryption data and the source code for the application. Coordinated actions were carried out in France and Germany, police said.

Authorities added that they had also identified the use of illegal streaming devices known locally in Italy as “pezzotto”, and said fines ranging from €154 to €5,000 would be issued to around 1,000 users linked to the piracy network.

By Aghakazim Guliyev