Italian financial police, the Guardia di Finanza, have dismantled a sophisticated streaming piracy network that caused an estimated €300 million in damages to major rights holders such as Sky, DAZN, Netflix, Disney+, and Spotify. The operation targeted a previously unseen technology centered around an application called CINEMAGOAL, which connected users' devices to foreign servers to illegally decrypt streaming content.
How the Network Operated
The system utilized virtual machines operating around the clock on Italian soil to capture and retransmit access codes from legitimate subscriptions every three minutes, effectively bypassing streaming platforms' security checks. Users of the illegal service were offered subscriptions ranging from €40 to €130 per year, significantly undercutting the cost of legitimate streaming services.
International Cooperation
Prosecutors in Bologna, working with Eurojust, secured the seizure of foreign servers storing decryption data and the application's source code. Parallel operations were conducted in France and Germany, and 1,000 identified pirate users face fines between €154 and €5,000.
