THE’Operation “Taken Down”the largest action ever carried out in Europe and Italy against it illegal streaming coordinated by the District Attorney’s Office of Catania and conducted by the Italian Postal Police in collaboration with the authorities of various countries, ha dealt a serious blow to online piracy defeating the largest European network of criminals with 22 million users. The operation, which involved over 270 agentsled to 11 arrests on 102 under investigationwith 89 searches in 15 Italian regions and 14 in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, Romania and Croatia.
How the international illegal streaming pirate network was dismantled in Europe
The investigation allowed the authorities to dismantle the largest transnational criminal organization dedicated to illegal streaming never identified in Europe until now. This network generated millionaire profits thanks to the illicit diffusion of matches, films and TV series broadcast by the main streaming platforms, including Amazon Prime Video, DAZN, Disney+, Mediaset, Netflix, Paramount and Sky. Through the use of social media, blogs and forums, the suspects advertised their wide “offer” of illegal streaming content, which was exploited by well 22 million users.
The maxi blitz highlighted one complex IT infrastructurebased on rented servers with false documents located in various geographical areas and a dense network of accomplices who tried to evade investigations by continuously transferring services to new domains. Despite attempts to escape justice – including the use of encrypted messaging applications, fictitious identities and credit cards registered to non-existent people – the timely intervention of the authorities made it possible to stop the criminals.
The Postal Police, in commenting on the success of the operation, stated:
With the operation, coordinated by the District Attorney’s Office of the Republic of Catania, it was the largest transnational criminal organization dedicated to audiovisual piracy has been dismantled which made use of a complex IT infrastructure that illegally served over 22 million end users.
Why the “Taken Down” operation against illegal streaming was a success
The investigation, the result of constant monitoring of the Web, was a success made possible by the collaboration between Italian and foreign police forcesin particular from the United Kingdom, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Romania and Croatia. Precisely in Croatia, the authorities made 11 arrests, highlighting the breadth of the criminal network. Without international cooperation between these police forces, it would undoubtedly have been more complicated to collect valuable data to reconstruct the entire criminal network. Operation “Taken Down” demonstrated how necessary a global approach is to tackle a problem – that of online piracy – which, as we well know, knows no national borders.
How illegal streaming works
From a technical point of view, the online piracy network dismantled with Operation Take Down worked thanks to technology IPTV (Internet Protocol Television), in which criminals pay via subscriptions to platforms (Sky, DAZN, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+ and so on) for content which they then illegally transmit via streaming to users. “Customers” of this network usually purchase the so-called “piece”an Android-based decoder that receives and decodes the streaming stream, to watch content protected by television rights or on-demand tariffs for free or at a reduced price. The contents “captured” by criminals are then encoded by an encoder – which makes the data compatible with IPTV technology – and sent to servers usually installed abroad, where they are then distributed via the Internet to users’ devices.
To counteract this phenomenon, theAGCOM (Communications Guarantee Authority) set up the platform Piracy Shieldwhich upon receiving the report from the owner of the content (for example DAZN) informs the providers to block pirated sites.
