The Net: stopped a pezzotto with 50 thousand users

Yet another pezzotto has jumped. The operation was carried out by the Guardia di Finanza, impounding the network and cutting off the service to over 50,000 users. Now the danger is triggered not only for the protagonists of the offer identified by the "The Net" operation (coordinated by the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office), but also for individual users who have accepted the offer in full awareness of using pirated material. The press release from the Fiamme Gialle is in fact explicit on this point: "further investigations are underway in order to fully identify the individual recipients of illegal IPTV". For the latter, the risk goes beyond the sanction, reaching up to 4 months of sentence.

The Net: a pezzotto of 50 thousand users stopped

Joining the pezzotto means enjoying content which they hold the rights to Sky Italia and the Lega Nazionale Professionisti Serie A, being able to use them through Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) at low prices compared to those of a Sky subscription or similar.

Subsequent investigations revealed the existence of an articulated organization, operating in different regions of the national territory, dedicated to the sale and distribution of decoding devices suitable for allowing access to the IPTV encrypted service in order to benefit from television content, without paying the fee due; the users of the pirate service also obtained technical assistance from the organization for the maintenance of electronic devices. The economic and financial police activities, made more complex by the use, by the suspects, of VPN (Virtual Private Network) systems to anonymize communications, led to the reporting of 3 subjects for the crime provided for by art. 171-ter of the Copyright Law.

The squeeze around illegal IPTV systems has become particularly strong in this 2020 which, by virtue of the restrictions that have led many Italians to spend many hours closed in their homes, has seen a multiplication of pirate activities and flows of money subtracted from the law and consigned to bad business systems. For this reason the fight against the "pezzotto" has become a priority, engaging the authorities in the repression of a mechanism of serious damage to intellectual property in a particularly delicate economic moment.

Source: Guardia di Finanza