Italian Authorities Shut Down Major Streaming Piracy Network

CinemaGoal, an app known for illegally recirculating streaming content from Netflix, Disney+, Spotify and others, is the latest pirate ship to sink. The Guardia di Finanza, an Italian law enforcement agency under the country’s Ministry of Economy and Finance, announced that it conducted more than 100 searches and seizures across the country related to the CinemaGol app.

Italian authorities said the app runs 24 hours a day, rerouting access codes from legitimate subscriptions to fake accounts that stream media to Cinemagoal subscribers. According to the Guardia di Finanza, the app’s design was smart enough to avoid the platform’s security checks and did not require a connection to a user’s IP address, making it harder to track. The Italian agency said CinemaGoal subscriptions went for between 40 to 130 euros, $46 to $151 per year and were paid for through hard-to-trace methods such as cryptocurrencies or fake foreign bank accounts.

Guardia di Finanza initially estimated CinemaGoal’s financial loss to be around 300 million euros, or about $350 million, but is also targeting the first 1,000 customers who used the devices for pirating the app with fines ranging between 154 to 5,000 euros, or $179 to $5,800. It’s unclear whether CinemaGoal is gone forever, but the Italian agency said it worked with other European authorities to seize the servers that held decryption data and the app’s source code. Before the crackdown on CinemaGol, authorities around the world have been making it harder to access pirated content online. In 2022, popular piracy site Popcorn Time was shut down in 2022, while illegal sports streaming service StreamEast was recently taken offline in September last year.