An anonymous source has been responsible for helping the police make an arrest that once again has a thunderous impact on the IPTV piracy sector. The two detainees will not only go to prison, but they will have to pay a million-dollar sum in damages for the crimes they have committed. The police warn: they do not want to leave any pirate network active.
The Swedish police have taken this important investigation against a piracy network in stride, knowing that, in the end, they would hunt down those responsible. And the longer they were committing crimes, the greater the punishment would be. In 2019 they received the first tip that put the agents’ sights on the pirates. Shortly after, they received another warning: they knew there was something big they could get their hands on.
A huge pirate IPTV network
The “prize” of patience that the agents had has been of great value. The two pirates who have been arrested were operating an illegal IPTV network that was reaching more than 12,000 customers who paid them instead of accessing legal methods to watch free TV. Apparently, at least from what has been discovered with the records accessed by the authorities, the illegal network began offering its service in 2017. Two years later, an anonymous source contacted Nordic Content Protection, the agency that deals with combating piracy in the region, and informed them of what was happening. A year later, another person contacted this same organization and told them that he had just purchased and received one of the devices offered by these pirates.
Not only did he give them the information that the agency would need to continue putting the investigation in the hands of the authorities, but that client offered to sell them the device for the same price he had paid: $260. When the terminal fell into the hands of the police, further investigation would be much easier. The end of the pirate network was approaching, which occurred in the year 2021.
Before the raid, the police already had in their hands the information on the places where the pirates supposedly resided and the data necessary to begin surveillance tasks. They tapped their telephone lines and carried out several maneuvers to obtain the necessary evidence to put them in jail. Thus they ended up carrying out a raid in which they put an end to the pirate IPTV network and confiscated much more than they imagined.
This is what they found
The raids were carried out in two cities: Sandviken and Gävle. The computers they found in their homes gave them away in different ways and all the computers were linked to the pirate playback device that this anonymous source had sold to the anti-piracy agency. They discovered that one of the two detainees was in charge of managing and renting the servers where the pirate television network was located, while the other was the specialist who managed everything related to the software. Having the hardware and software distributed between the two, they ensured that both were needed to continue the illegal operation.
In the criminal’s house in Sandviken there were surprises, because the detainee was hiding 47 solid gold ingots. The other detainee also did not forget to indulge himself occasionally, given that he had a collection of whiskey bottles that, according to the authorities, is valued at almost $100,000. In addition to this, digital records led to the discovery of two cryptocurrency wallets in which $24,700 and $41,200 in Bitcoin were stored.
Although the arrest took place in 2021, the case has not gone through the courts until this month. Now they have been sentenced to spend 36 months in prison and pay an amount of 18 million dollars that will go to those who have been affected by the existence of their piracy network. Taking into account the companies that offer television service in the country, the beneficiaries of this million-dollar amount will be Warner Bros. Discovery, C More and Viaplay.
This is an amount much higher than the fines that have had to be paid in other cases for this type of crime. For example, other pirates arrested a few years ago had to pay 6 and a half million dollars. But it is obvious that the authorities want to show the pirates who are still maintaining their businesses that they are coming after them and that the consequences are not enough to ignore.
