One of the biggest piracy problems that television was experiencing was related to the internet. A new method, active for several years now, allowed users to access pay-per-view television signals through a IPTV connection, a mechanism that is very difficult to account for and that has been doing damage until yesterday.
A business that operated from Spain
The national police managed yesterday to complete the call Operation Belenus with the arrest of a total of five people. This group was in charge of cloning the television signal of numerous pay television services to offer access to all of them through the Internet in a very simple way for the user. The client, who paid a very small amount compared to the price to be paid for official services, only had to use a program that allowed him to open .m3u lists or a satellite decoder with the possibility of configuring a CAM protocol.
Such was the growth in the use of this type of system that countless programs capable of play IPTV lists with complete ease. All that was needed was access to those lists, and that is precisely what the group that has been arrested was doing.
How did this IPTV service work?
The infrastructure needed to offer this type of service globally is especially large, and although it was indeed large, those responsible carried out numerous practices so as not to leave too many clues about their work. For example, the service worked thanks to a total of 11 server farms, some with more than 40 servers, a huge infrastructure that was interspersed periodically creating new web pages.
In this way, the large number of pages created generated a network that was very difficult to trace, so it was quite difficult to get to the core of the problem. As far as money is concerned, they created several companies related to telecommunications, internet and hardware services to divert attention, giving the impression that they were fiber optic providers (which they apparently did) while on the other hand they sold pirate IPTV lists.
Although the main managers of the service were in Malaga, two more partners lived in Denmark, where the operation of the service was focused, taking advantage of the quality of the connections offered in the country. It was such a demanded network that subscribers have been identified in a total of 30 different countries.
Luxury life for selling IPTV lists
Bearing in mind that these services offered up to a total of 800 channels, the prices according to the contracted package (more or less channels) were around between 40 and 460 euros per month per subscriber, figures that generated quite a few benefits for the group, so much so that it is estimated that since its inception they have been able to earn about 8 million euros. In addition, those arrested had a fairly high standard of living, since they lived in exclusive urbanizations on the Malaga coast and owned a large number of luxury cars (a total of 12 high-end vehicles have been seized).