Italian Authorities Shut Down Major Streaming Piracy Network

Cinemagoal, the app known for illegally reposting streaming content from Netflix, Disney+, Spotify and more, is the latest pirate ship to sink. La Guardia di Finanza, an Italian law enforcement agency under the country’s Ministry of Economy and Finance, announced it has carried out more than 100 searches and seizures across the country linked to the Cinemagoal app.

The Italian authority said the app operated 24 hours a day, relaying 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 clever enough to bypass a platform’s security controls and did not require logging into a user’s IP address, making it harder to track. Cinemagoal subscriptions ranged from 40 to 130 euros, or between $46 and $151 per year, and were paid via hard-to-trace methods, such as cryptocurrency or fake foreign bank accounts, the Italian agency said.

The Guardia di Finanza initially estimated Cinemagoal’s financial damage at around 300 million euros, or about $350 million, but is also targeting the first 1,000 subscribers who used devices for the piracy app, with fines ranging from 154 to 5,000 euros, or between $179 and $5,800. It’s unclear whether Cinemagoal is gone for good, but the Italian agency said it worked with other European authorities to seize the servers containing the app’s decryption data and source code. Before the crackdown on Cinemagoal, authorities around the world had made it harder to access pirated content online. In 2022, popular piracy site Popcorn Time shut down, while illegal sports streaming service Streameast was taken offline more recently, in September last year.