ROME, Sept. 18 (Xinhua) -- Italian authorities on Wednesday launched a major anti-piracy operation against an illegal video-streaming platform, which included raids across the country and in other five European countries.
Coordinated by prosecutors in Naples, financial police targeted and dismantled the IPTV service management system Xtream Codes platform, designed by two Greek citizens and counting on more than 5 million users in Italy only, according to a police statement.
The platform illegally offered contents copyrighted by Italian channels Sky Italy and Mediaset, and by Netflix, Infinity, and Dazn streamers for an estimated turnover of 60 million euros (66.3 million U.S. dollars) per year, police specified.
"The members of the organization arranged and managed suitable IT spaces from abroad, and through them they re-broadcast the signals on a large scale, including in Italy," they explained.
In Italy, the commercial network acquiring the content packages and reselling them to final customers (for as low as 12 euros per month) had major bases in the northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto, and in southern Campania, Puglia, Calabria and Sicily.
Some 25 premises and offices were raided, and 197 financial accounts seized in the country.
At the same time, Italian authorities explained, "eight European investigation orders issued by the Naples prosecution office... were simultaneously conducted in the Netherlands, France, Greece, Germany, and Bulgaria," in collaboration with the European Union (EU) agencies for investigation and judicial coordination Europol and Eurojust and the respective national police forces.
Overall, the European-wide operation targeted three companies and five people, whose names were not immediately disclosed.
Police only said the persons "responsible for the organization" were being prosecuted for criminal association aimed at the illicit reproduction and marketing of IPTV, aggravated by transnational crime.
Yet, they did not specify whether orders of arrest have been issued so far.
In addition to the seizure of the entire Xtream Code platform, further 80 websites and 183 servers connected with the reproduction and spreading of the video content packages were confiscated and obscured.
When raided, such websites and servers were delivering to about 700,000 online users, police added.
Italian final customers of the Xtream Codes streaming would be located and possibly put under investigation, according to the chief of the financial police's Special Unit for the Protection of Privacy and Technological Fraud (NSPFT).
"It must be clear that (subscribing to illegal streaming services) is also a crime, which includes the risk of jail conviction from 6 months to 3 years, and of a fine worth 2,500 to 25,000 euros," Col. Giovanni Reccia told reporters in a press conference later in the day.
