Italy busts €300 million streaming piracy ring

ROME, May 22 (Reuters) - ‌Italy's financial ​police ​said on Friday they had busted a sophisticated streaming piracy network that caused ‌roughly €300 million ($348 million) in damages to rights ⁠holders such as Sky, DAZN, Netflix, Disney+ and Spotify.

The ‌operation targeted previously unseen ‌technology built around an application called CINEMAGOAL, which connected users' devices to foreign servers that ​illegally decrypted streaming content, the Guardia di Finanza police said.

Virtual machines operated around the ⁠clock on Italian soil, capturing and retransmitting access codes from legitimate ​subscriptions registered to fictitious account holders every three minutes, police added.

The system bypassed streaming ​platforms' security checks and ‌did not require a connection directly associated with a specific IP address, making ⁠it harder to detect users. Subscriptions were offered for €40 to €130 per year.

Prosecutors in Bologna, working with ⁠EU judicial cooperation body Eurojust, secured the seizure of foreign ​servers storing decryption data and the application's source code, with parallel operations carried out in France and Germany, ‌police said.

The Guardia di Finanza also uncovered the use of traditional illegal streaming ‌devices, commonly known in Italy as "pezzotto", and ⁠will issue fines for ‌1,000 identified pirate ​system users ranging from €154 to €5,000.

($1 = 0.8616 euros)

(Reporting by Alvise Armellini; Editing by Alex ‌Richardson)

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