THE HAGUE, Sept. 18 (Xinhua) -- A "multi-country action day" coordinated by Eurojust, the European Union's (EU) Judicial Cooperation Unit, has led to the dismantling of an international criminal network accused of committing massive pay TV fraud, it was announced here on Wednesday.
Supported by a coordination centre at Eurojust, more than 200 servers were taken offline in Germany, France and the Netherlands, and over 150 PayPal accounts of the criminals were blocked in a simultaneous operation taking place earlier on Wednesday, leading to the disruption of the signal for illegal pay TV viewers in Europe, who benefited from a subscription fee far below market value.
A total of 22 suspects of different nationalities were identified.
According to Eurojust, the actions taken in this "unique case" in the EU are the result of complex investigations conducted by prosecutors from Naples and Rome, with the support of judicial and police authorities from Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, France and the Netherlands.
The damage caused by the criminal group amounts to 6.5 million euros (7.2 million U.S. dollars), jeopardising the existence of many legal pay TV providers. This case shows that organized crime is expanding its illegal activities to large-scale violations of audiovisual copyright, Eurojust said in a statement.
In 2015, the organized criminal group (OCG) started illegally re-broadcasting and selling pay-per-view products and services, similar to the ones offered by Sky Italia, Mediaset Premium, Netflix, Dazon and Infinity in various EU member states and third countries.
According to Eurojust, the criminals used the most sophisticated and efficient software to commit the fraud. Several retransmission stations were set up with special servers to disable the encryption of the original programs and generate the illegal internet protocol TV (IPTV) signal in violation of intellectual property law.
The OCG members offered actual pay TV programs, cinematographic works and on-demand content at a very low price to a wide audience of unknowing clients. The illegally obtained assets were subsequently transferred to foreign bank accounts. The members of the OCG are suspected of having committed large-scale fraud, cyber crime and money laundering.
