Illegal IPTV Crackdown: European Police Target Distributors – Latest News and Updates

2023-06-30 23:13:31

IPTV is a means of having access to the television offer from around the world, which is attracting more and more Belgians. However, it is in most cases highly illegal, and Italian suppliers recently paid the price during a European police operation.

In a vast operation to fight once morest illegal broadcasting, the German-Italian police, united under the banner of Europol, led the dismantling of a network of IPTV distributors.

As a reminder, IPTV, a system for broadcasting television content on the Internet, is not necessarily illegal. But in the form in which it is best known, i.e. the sharing of more than thousands of television channels with consumers at ultra-competitive prices, this offer is systematically in violation of copyright, and can lead to 300,000 euros in damages. fine or a three-year prison sentence.

But in fact, it is above all the distributors who are targeted by these sanctions, and it is therefore on them that the fight led by institutions such as Europol is centered, as is the case with this clandestine transalpine group.

This network of thirteen people, all Italians with the exception of an Albanian member, sold their services mainly on Telegram, with a channel called “Impero IPTV” as their main channel, and transferred a good part of their assets in cryptocurrencies, for a total of approximately 620,000 euros seized by the European police.

They operated on a three-tier pyramid scheme, which allowed them to sell their services to both individuals and resellers. Moreover, some of the buyers, the “masters” might in turn create their own network. The dismantling of this network is therefore indirectly that of several independent sub-networks.

An action that is not new since at the end of May, Europol had also dismantled another IPTV giant in the Netherlands… So that it might come back to work a few hours later.

Indeed, the IPTV market always ends up falling back on its feet, because this illegal market abhors a vacuum, and it is therefore more than likely that these deleted services will be replaced by other equally illegal offers, but attractive to the consumer.

It therefore remains to be seen what the long-term effects of this dismantling will be, and whether it will really have an impact on the illegal IPTV market.

It might therefore be that in the future, customers will also be impacted by certain sanctions, in order to have a real impact on the matter. A decision that is not an easy task when a fraction of the population, which is around 10% in most countries, or one million users in the case of Belgium, uses IPTV, and that it is impossible to target them all.

This is why Italy, a pioneer in the field, is rather targeting targeted actions, with a few thousand customers all the same who have been forced to pay a fine amounting to only around one hundred euros. A punitive system that might spread to other countries.

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