Italian Police Seize Piracy App Streaming Sky, DAZN, and Netflix
May 22, 2026 - 10:09 am
Operazione Tutto Chiaro hit over 100 sites across Italy, France, and Germany, targeting a system that rebroadcast legitimate subscription codes every three minutes. Italy’s Guardia di Finanza said on Friday it had dismantled an audiovisual piracy operation that streamed paid content from Sky, DAZN, Netflix, Disney+, and Spotify to thousands of subscribers using an app called CINEMAGOAL.
Officers carried out more than 100 searches and seizures across Italy on Thursday, with parallel actions in France and Germany coordinated through Eurojust. The investigation was directed by the Bologna prosecutor’s office and led by the Ravenna unit of the financial police.
What Was Uncovered?
What investigators describe is unusual enough to warrant attention. CINEMAGOAL did not stream from an unauthorised library in the conventional sense. Installed on a customer’s device, the app reached out to a foreign server and decrypted live audiovisual content using the credentials of legitimate subscriptions held by fictitious account holders.
Virtual machines positioned on Italian territory captured the active subscription codes every three minutes and relayed them, almost in real time, to paying users. The end product, in effect, was a clean signal pulled from a legal account whose registered name nobody had ever met.
The Guardia di Finanza says the architecture was specifically designed to evade detection. Because each end-user was decrypting content through the foreign server rather than connecting directly to a streaming platform, no traceable IP address was tied to the viewing session. That feature was, by police account, the main thing the resellers advertised to prospective customers.
Distribution and Operations
Distribution was handled by more than seventy people across Italy, who sold annual subscriptions priced between €40 and €130 depending on the package, taking payment in cryptocurrency or through foreign and fictitiously held accounts. They retained a cut and passed the rest up the chain to the organisers, in the familiar arithmetic of a tiered reseller network.
To seize the foreign servers that held the decryption data and the application’s source code, the prosecutor’s office turned to Eurojust to coordinate the simultaneous operations in France and Germany. About 200 finanzieri were deployed across the Italian raids alone, according to the Ravenna unit.
Investigators also flagged that the same network was running the more familiar pezzotto form of pirate IPTV in parallel, suggesting CINEMAGOAL was one product line inside a wider operation rather than a standalone scheme.
Impact and Consequences
In a first estimate compiled with the affected platforms, the Guardia di Finanza put the damage from uncollected subscription rights at around €300 million. Investigators caution that the figure is provisional and will be revised as the seized material is analysed.
The first 1,000 subscribers traced through the investigation are being issued administrative fines ranging from €154 to €5,000, with more names expected to follow.
Italian authorities, in a significant achievement, have dismantled a sophisticated piracy network that exploited a unique method to stream paid content from major streaming platforms. The operation, codenamed Operazione Tutto Chiaro, targeted the app CINEMAGOAL, which circumvented traditional piracy methods by using legitimate subscription credentials to decrypt live content. This innovative approach involved virtual machines capturing subscription codes every three minutes and distributing them to users, providing a seamless pirated streaming experience. The raid, involving over 200 financial police officers, led to the seizure of foreign servers and the app's source code, showcasing the global coordination required to combat such sophisticated piracy schemes. The estimated damage from uncollected subscription fees is a staggering €300 million, highlighting the economic impact of piracy on the entertainment industry. Read the full article