Spanish police break up Europe’s largest illegal TV streaming service
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Spanish Police launched a major operation against an international criminal organization accused of illegally selling access to pay-TV over the internet. Spanish officials calculate that this was Europe’s largest illegal TV streaming service and is estimated to have made €8 million in profits since 2013.
Spanish police have arrested five members of a criminal organization which is based in Spain and has branches in Denmark, the United Kingdom, Latvia, the Netherlands and Cyprus.
Thousands of people from 30 different countries paid between €40 and €460 a month to watch their favourite soccer games, TV shows and movies. The monthly fees were made to a company in Gibraltar, the British Overseas Territory located in the south of Spain.
Police were alerted to the organization in 2015 after Premier League, England’s first division soccer league, filed a complaint stating that a web-based service in Málaga in Costa del Sol was offering Internet Protocol television (IPTV) subscriptions – a service that distributes pay-TV online – without authorization.
The Spanish police led a joint investigation with Denmark and the United Kingdom in which 14 other branches were found: eight in Spain (in Málaga, Madrid and Alicante), four in Denmark and two in the United Kingdom.
As a result of the investigation, 66 servers were disconnected and the rest, which were part of a network of internationally connected computers, were detected and identified.
