Thanks to a large-scale operation, the police of a country have allegedly caused a “black screen” among 1.3 million pirates watching Euro 2024 via illegal IPTV services.
If the pirate sites do not necessarily seek to make people talk about them, the entities in charge of closing them down are on the contrary eager to announce to the world the success of their operations. There are countless statements explaining that one of the best-known IPTV services in the world has finally fallen following the coordinated actions of rights holders and the authorities. Typically, the release remains factual, with a few sentences reserved for congratulations from associated parties. But some do not hesitate to create sensationalism.
Among the different countries of Europe, Italy is customary in doing so. It must be said that it is particularly aggressive when it comes to putting an end to IPTV platforms. Remember: his police went so far as to redirect all of the territory’s Internet traffic to identify the hackers. Same enthusiasm when it launched its famous anti-piracy shield supposed to kill piracy, but whose launch failed. In this context, we better understand the latest statement from the Guardia di Finanza (GdF), specialized in this fight.
Italian police say they stopped over a million pirates from watching Euro 2024 illegally
The GdF thus led “a major investigation to combat the phenomenon of audiovisual piracy, called “IPTV”“. She continues: “As part of the 2024 European Football Championship, Fiamme Gialle carried out 14 local and computer searches throughout the national territory against 13 suspects, residing in different Italian regions and abroad“. We do not know what a “computer search” is, especially since the police do not talk about seized materials among the suspects, nor evenarrest of the latter.
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However, she specifies that “the signal transmission was therefore jammed, preventing access to content for more than 1.3 million users“. An impressive figure that is impossible to verify as it stands and which can reasonably be doubted. If we base ourselves on the latest figures of theAudiovisual Anti-Piracy Allianceobtained in 2021, approximately 1.14 million of Italians use illegal IPTV services. Even imagining that their number has doubled in 3 years, the GdF would have affected more than half of the country’s pirates with this operation. It is therefore possible that the authorities have slightly embellished the situation.
Source: TorrentFreak