In an effort to combat rampant digital piracy in Vietnam, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) continues to target major piracy syndicates in Vietnam.
While ACE celebrated the shut down of multiple piracy websites belonging to the same piracy syndicate operating out of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, since June 2023, Vietnam continues to be an exporter of pirated video content globally.
Among the piracy sites shut down in the third quarter of 2023 are:
- 2embed, a video content hosting site that provided content for hundreds of piracy websites around the world.
- More than 300 piracy streaming sites that relied upon 2embed as their content source. These sites had a combined 2.8 billion global visits in the past two years.
- Zoro.to, one of the world’s largest illegal streaming services, which averaged more than 200 million global visits per month from January through June 2023.
- Goku.to, which averaged more than 30 million visits per month from January through June 2023.
- Cineb.net, actvid.com and showbox-movies.net, which had combined traffic of more than 129 million global visits from January through September 2023.
- Tinyzone.tv, 3388.to, freemovies360.com, and ev01.net, which had combined traffic of more than 8.78 million global visits from January through September 2023.
Job isn’t over
Earlier in 2023, ACE announced the shutdown of another Vietnam-based piracy operation USTVGO, which provided illicit access to more than 100 live channels, including sports channels, the majority of which belonged to ACE members. Prior to its shutdown USTVGO and its associated domains were averaging more than 16 million visits per month, with 75% of the traffic originating in the United States.
“Piracy operators in Vietnam have run some of the world’s most egregious piracy services, which cause significant damage to the local and international economies and make Vietnam a piracy hotspot,” said Jan van Voorn, Executive Vice President and Chief of Global Content Protection for the Motion Picture Association and Head of ACE.
Further reading
ACE marks progress in fight against piracy in Vietnam. Press release. November 6, 2023. Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE)
Why it matters
“ACE’s actions in in Vietnam mark a major step forward in the global fight against piracy. We’re confident that our ongoing collaboration with the Vietnamese government can help pave the way for the criminal prosecution of the operators behind these highly profitable and damaging piracy websites and services,” said ACE’s van Voorn.
