On May 20, the Guardia di Finanza of Ravenna, with the support of the Specialized Units for Privacy Protection and Technological Fraud, Goods and Services, and numerous other law enforcement units, carried out more than 100 searches and seizures throughout the national territory delegated by the Bologna Prosecutor’s Office.
The operation stemmed from an investigation aimed at countering the spread of illegal subscriptions to access premium content offered by SKY, DAZN, Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, and others. Uncollected royalties were estimated at about 300 million euros.
The first 1,000 users identified by the investigation have been given fines ranging between €154 to €5,000, and more are expected.
How it worked
Users installed an app called CINEMAGOAL on their consumer devices, which connected them to a foreign server to access and decrypt the chosen audiovisual content.
Virtual machines captured and retransmitted stolen access credentials to CINEMAGOAL users every three minutes, which had the effect of associating legitimate accounts to fictitious users who then could access premium programming ‘in the clear.’
A highly advanced system circumvented the security blocks set up by the platforms, and reduced the possibility that end users could be “intercepted” by the control system by routing their sessions through foreign servers. Hence, the CINEMAGOAL app could not be directly associated with a specific IP address.
Details of the offering
More than 70 resellers promoted this anonymous capability, charging a cost ranging from 40 to 130 euros per year (based on the “packages” selected), through payments made (preferably) with cryptocurrency or through foreign or fictitious accounts that were not easily traceable; splitting the proceeds between the reseller and the originators.
Monitoring of social media exposed the existence of the operation. The same operation was also found to be operating a more ‘traditional’ pirate IPTV system.
International investigation
The Guardia di Finanza coordinated cooperation with Eurojust to conduct seizures in France and Germany, ordering the seizure of foreign computer media in which the data necessary to decode the protected audiovisual signals are kept, as well as the source code of the program, essential for the functionality of the aforementioned application.
About 200 agents were deployed to identify all the subjects involved, including the final buyers, as well as to determine the illicit millionaire profits overall achieved in relation to the crime hypotheses of “audiovisual piracy”, “abusive access to computer systems” and “computer fraud”.
Why it matters
Piracy across Europe continues to be on the rise, increasing in sophistication; and governments in many European countries have implemented anti-piracy platforms.
In 2024, Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM took over a piracy ticketing platform called Piracy Shield, which notifies ISPs of infringing operators, with the goal of shutting them down within 30 minutes. The Guardia press release made no mention of Piracy Shield
Further reading
Operation “All clear.” Press release. May 21, 2026. Guardia di Finanza (Ministry of Economy and Finance), Italy
