Two Greeks Arrested in European Pirate IPTV Network Crackdown
- The Greek police have arrested two men in Athens and Thessaloniki, over copyright infringement and money laundering accusations.
- The streaming bust wasn’t limited to Greece only, but several other European countries as well.
- The network managed to make a total of 6500000 Euros since 2015 when it initiated its operation.
Two Greeks aged 27 and 31 were arrested in Athens and Thessaloniki were they respectively lived, and now face accusations of being the main orchestrators behind a European pirate IPTV service network. According to a local media outlet, the whole operation was coordinated by Eurojust and involved the Greek police and the subdivision for the prosecution of cybercrime. The information that led to the two men was actually gathered by Italian authorities, leading to the raids in Greece as well as other countries across Europe.
The pirate IPTV network is believed to have amassed financial benefits of up to 6.5 million Euros, from when it started its operation in 2015. While the network had “nodes” in the Netherlands, Malta, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Italy, Germany, and France, the two Greeks are believed to have been the brains of the illegal operation. During the raids in their homes, the police found and seized 28 IPTV devices, 8 servers, 3 laptops, 9 internal hard drives, 3 external hard drives, 4 SIM cards, 10 credit cards, two hardware wallets for cryptocurrency, and a bill counter. On the possession of the 31-year-old, the police have also found 114550 Euros in cash.
Source: astynomia.gr
Combining data from the raids that took place in other locations around Europe, the network relied on 200 servers that helped to deliver pirated content streams to the customers. Moreover, the members of the network operated a total of 150 PayPal accounts, which have been blocked and seized now. While the name of the IPTV service that was taken down wasn’t specified, yesterday’s reports about Xtream Codes going down following a Europe-wide operation is almost certainly related to this story. This service offered channels from Sky, Netflix, Infinity, Mediaset, DAZN, and more, in exchange for 12 Euros per month.
If you suddenly lost your connection to the Xtream Codes service, this is to confirm that you shouldn’t be expecting it to return any time soon. Obviously, there won’t be any refunds to those who prepaid for lengthy membership plans either. Back in May, we saw how subscribers of OneStepTV.com lost their subscription money when the MPAA and ACE managed to shut down the platform and seize all its infrastructure. That said, if you want to subscribe to a pirate IPTV service, remember the risks and pick a short-term plan even if it isn’t the best value.
Were you using Xtream Codes? Are you planning to subscribe to a legal streaming service now? Let us know in the comments down below, or on our socials, on Facebook and Twitter.