Italian financial police have dismantled a sophisticated piracy network that used an application called 'Cinemagoal' to stream content illegally. [4, 5] The operation is estimated to have caused around €300 million in damages to rights holders, including Sky, DAZN, Netflix, Disney+, and Spotify. [9, 11, 15] Annual subscriptions to the illicit service were sold for €40 to €130. [11, 12]
The network utilized a novel technique, capturing and retransmitting access codes from legitimate subscriptions every three minutes to mask users' IP addresses. [4, 7, 11] The investigation, led by authorities in Ravenna and Bologna, involved over 100 searches across Italy and coordinated seizures of servers in France and Germany with the help of Eurojust. [4, 5] Authorities have begun issuing fines to the first 1,000 identified subscribers. [5, 6]