Italy's financial police have dismantled a sophisticated streaming piracy network estimated to have caused around €300 million ($348 million) in damages to rights holders including Sky, DAZN, Netflix, Disney+ and Spotify.
The operation targeted a system built around an application called CINEMAGOAL, which connected users' devices to foreign servers that illegally decrypted streaming content. Virtual machines operated continuously on Italian soil, capturing and retransmitting access codes from legitimate subscriptions every three minutes.
The technology bypassed streaming platforms' security checks and did not require a connection linked to a specific IP address, making detection difficult. Subscriptions were sold for between €40 and €130 per year.
Prosecutors in Bologna, working with Eurojust, secured the seizure of foreign servers storing decryption data and the application's source code. Parallel operations were carried out in France and Germany.
Police also uncovered the use of traditional illegal streaming devices, known in Italy as 'pezzotto', and will issue fines to 1,000 identified users ranging from €154 to €5,000.
