A group of criminals went as far as to register and manage two Internet Service Providers in two different countries in order to manage an illegal TV streaming platform that offered IPTV (IP Television) service to customers all over the world.
Dismantled this week by Europol, Eurojust, Spanish and Bulgarian police, authorities first learned of this group last year after a complaint from the English Football Association (FA), the soccer federation that organizes England's Premier League competition.
The FA filed a complaint against a currently unnamed Danish citizen, the owner of the biggest ISP in the town of Malaga, Spain.
An investigation by Spanish authorities followed, and police officers quickly discovered that the ISP was a front for an organized crime group behind a platform that illegally streamed over 1,000 TV channels via the Internet.
Spanish and Bulgarian ISPs behind the IPTV platform
Their inquiry also unearthed a partner for the Spanish ISP, another service provider, but this one located in the Bulgarian town of Silistra.
The investigation, nicknamed "Operation Casper," concluded this week after searches at 12 locations in Spain and Bulgaria and the arrest of eight suspects.
According to authorities, the two ISPs were legally established companies on their own, and besides being a cover for the illegal TV streaming service, also provided Internet access for their customers.
The ISPs worked together with several shell companies
Europol says the two ISPs used their technical capabilities to support the IPTV platform's backend, while a series of shell companies were in charge of distributing the illicit TV signals to end users via the Internet.
Last year, Cisco announced the development of a new technology called Streaming Piracy Prevention (SPP) that could detect and cut off illegal TV streams in mid-transmission.
A study by researchers from the KU Leuven University in Leuven, Belgium, and Stony Brook University in New York, USA, revealed that more than half of the ads shown on illegal sports streaming sites are malicious.
Image credit: Cuerpo Nacional de Policia
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