Italian authorities shut down major streaming piracy network

Cinemagoal, the app known for illegally rebroadcasting streaming content from Netflix, Disney+, Spotify and more, 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 search and seizures across the country related to the Cinemagoal app.

The Italian authority said the app ran 24 hours a day, retransmitting access codes from legitimate subscriptions to fake accounts that streamed media to Cinemagoal subscribers. According to the Guardia di Finanza, the app's design was smart enough to get around a platform's security checks and didn't require a connection to a user's IP address, making it harder to track. Cinemagoal subscriptions went for 40 to 130 euros, between $46 to $151, a year and were paid through hard-to-trace methods, like cryptocurrency or fake foreign bank accounts, the Italian agency said.

The Guardia di Finanza initially estimated Cinemagoal's financial harm to be around 300 million euros, or around $350 million, but is also targeting the first 1,000 subscribers who used devices for the pirating app, with fines ranging from 154 to 5,000 euros, or between $179 to $5,800. It's not clear if Cinemagoal is gone for good, but the Italian agency said it worked with other European authorities to seize servers that contained decryption data and the app's source code. Before the crackdown on Cinemagoal, authorities across the world have been making it harder to access pirated content online. In 2022, the popular piracy site Popcorn Time shut down in 2022, while the illegal sports streaming service Streameast was taken offline more recently in September of last year.