Yesterday (18/09/19) Police in Italy, the Netherlands, France, and Bulgaria raided multiple locations in an effort to shut down what they say is the back end of many illegal IPTV services.

Xstream-codes.com is reportedly the company behind the software systems that run many IPTV services according to TorrentFreak.

“A multi-country action day coordinated by Eurojust in The Hague led to the dismantling of an international criminal network committing massive fraud with pay-TV, which shows organized crime expanding its illegal activities to large-scale violations of audiovisual copyright,” a statement from EU Eurojust said. “The damage caused by the criminal gang amounts to approximately €6.5 million, jeopardizing the existence of many legal providers of pay-TV on the market. More than 200 servers were taken offline in Germany, France and the Netherlands, and over 150 PayPal accounts of the criminals were blocked.”

Xtream-Codes offered an “all-in-one” solution to operate an IPTV service. According to police they now have control over the system and have reportedly cut off 5,000 clients servicing over 50 million customers around the world. Exactly what IPTV services used Xtream-Codes is unkown as is how much data the police got. It’s very likely they now know the names and locations of many of the 5,000 clients who sell the IPTV services.

It seems the police are hoping that by taking out the back end many IPTV services use they will not just stop one IPTV service but dramatically make it more difficult for new IPTV services to be created. How successful that will be is unknown at this time but TorrentFreak reports multiple IPTV networks are being disrupted because of this raid.

More information:
According to the press conference, the entire investigation only took 2-3 months. It all began with Italians in NAPLES capturing 1 RESELLER who sold IPTV in Italy via a Facebook page! Then they used information on his computer to track the operators of the service itself. They discovered that some members were outside Italy so they contacted EUROJUST and found out that this group was already under investigation by 5 EU countries (Italy, France, Germany, Bulgaria and Greece).