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Rabat – The Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) in the Netherlands has busted the biggest pirate Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) provider for illegal streaming, leading to several arrests carried out in coordination with Europol.
The provider has served more than a million customers in Europe and thousands of subscribers in Morocco with packages of more than 10,000 accessible television channels and a digital film library made up of 15,000 titles.
The names of the suspects have not been made public, but the operations that led to the first four arrests were carried out in several regions of the Netherlands, as part of the fight against illegal streaming, according to Europol.
FIOD agents also carried out a series of simultaneous searches in the homes of the suspects in Amsterdam, Almere, Enschede, The Hague, and Den Helder. The investigation led to the seizure of properties such as cars, computers, bank account numbers, and large sums of cash.
Europol’s European Financial and Economic Crime Center supported this investigation by helping to identify key targets and their illegal activities across Europe.
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Europol experts were deployed to various locations in the Netherlands last Tuesday to support the FIOD in its activities.
While IPTV is not illegal in the Netherlands, it is considered so if subscriptions to services are offered and not paid for.
This has been the “biggest criminal investigation” in digital piracy the Netherlands has ever seen, according to the intellectual property campaign group Stichting Brein.
