ROME, May 22 - Italian financial police announced the disruption of a sophisticated streaming piracy operation that investigators say inflicted around €300 million in losses on content rights holders, including Sky, DAZN, Netflix, Disney+ and Spotify.
Authorities described a previously unseen technological framework centered on an application named CINEMAGOAL. According to the Guardia di Finanza, the application linked users' devices to foreign servers that unlawfully decrypted streaming content.
Police said virtual machines running continuously on Italian territory captured and retransmitted access codes from legitimate subscriptions. Those subscriptions had been registered to fictitious account holders and the system reportedly refreshed captured access credentials every three minutes. Investigators further stated that the design bypassed security checks used by streaming platforms and did not require a connection traceable to a specific IP address, a feature that made detection of end users more difficult.
Subscriptions to the illicit service were offered at annual prices ranging from €40 to €130, authorities said. Prosecutors in Bologna, working with Eurojust, the EU judicial cooperation body, obtained seizure of foreign servers that stored decryption data as well as the source code of the application. Parallel enforcement actions took place in France and Germany.
In addition to the CINEMAGOAL-based scheme, the Guardia di Finanza reported uncovering conventional illegal streaming devices commonly referred to in Italy as "pezzotto." The police said they identified roughly 1,000 users of pirate systems and will issue administrative fines in amounts between €154 and €5,000.
Authorities included a currency reference noting that $1 equals 0.8616 euros.
Context and implications
The operation combined novel software-driven decryption with traditional illicit hardware distribution. Law enforcement actions resulted in seizures spanning multiple jurisdictions and targeted both back-end infrastructure - foreign servers and source code - and downstream users through fines.
Prosecutors in Bologna coordinated with EU-level judicial support to secure technical assets tied to the scheme. Police described the technical architecture as purpose-built to evade conventional platform security and complicate tracing to individual user IP addresses.