Italian Financial Police Dismantle €300 Million Streaming Piracy Ring

The Ravenna unit of the Italian Financial Police (Guardia di Finanza), under the direction of the Bologna public prosecutor's office, conducted a large-scale enforcement operation codenamed "Tutto Chiaro" on May 21–22. Nationwide, they executed over 100 searches and seizures. In coordination with Eurojust, they simultaneously seized foreign servers located in France and Germany, dismantling a technologically rare pirate streaming distribution network. Preliminary estimates place the uncollected royalty losses to rights holders such as Sky, DAZN, Netflix, Disney+, and Spotify at approximately €300 million (approx. $348 million).

The group's modus operandi was not "pirate broadcasting" but hijacking legitimate subscriptions.

This operation revealed for the first time in Italy a previously unseen piratical technical architecture built around an application called CINEMAGOAL. After users installed CINEMAGOAL on their devices, the client connected to foreign servers, which were responsible for decrypting and returning the target platform's audiovisual content. Multiple virtual machines deployed within Italy supported this chain: approximately every three minutes, they automatically intercepted and instantly replayed a batch of access tokens/authorization codes from legitimate subscription accounts registered under fictitious identities. This effectively fed a "cleartext signal" to pirate subscribers. The entire chain deliberately avoided binding to specific IP addresses, thereby circumventing platform security risk controls and tracking. Payment methods relied primarily on cryptocurrency settlements, supplemented by offshore accounts receiving illicit funds, with accounts opened under fictitious identities used to obscure the flow of money.

In short, this was not a traditional "mirror pirate source site" model, but rather a parasitic approach that operated within the access controls of legitimate platforms — using live credentials from legitimate accounts to open a "backdoor channel" for illegal subscribers.

The investigation confirmed that more than 70 distributors across Italy sold this "service" through a multi‑tier agency model. Annual fees ranged from €40 to €130 depending on the package. Distributors took a commission and forwarded the remaining proceeds to the organizers. Approximately 200 financial police officers were deployed in a single operation, seizing decrypted data and the source code of CINEMAGOAL from foreign servers.

Authorities have already identified an initial batch of approximately 1,000 identified subscribers, who will face administrative penalties ranging from €154 to €5,000. The criminal investigation against the organizers covers audiovisual piracy, illegal intrusion into computer systems, and computer fraud. The case remains in its preliminary investigation stage. The China Intellectual Property Lawyers Network will continue to follow further developments.