Police raid ends with two arrests and hundreds of devices seized

Europe has taken a stand against services that stream pirated football matches and movies on the Internet. Arrests for pirated IPTV in Europe and other European countries demonstrate this.

But there is no point in shutting down services that operate locally if users simply turn to competitors. And the fact is that many pirate platforms do not operate entirely on European territory, but rather They depend on services or “materials” created in other countries. And now one of these platforms has just been closed.

Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) has confirmed a major police operation against the owners of Sunny TV, also known as Qingtian TV. The service offered live TV streaming, with content obtained directly from legal broadcasters, all in a very easy-to-use app.

Like other pirate services, Sunny TV’s big appeal was that it offered a large number of pay TV channels and on-demand streaming services, accessible with a single payment, rather than having to pay for each one separately. This landed it on the target lists of copyright organisations, including AGCOM; the Italian regulator is famous for implementing Piracy Shield, a system that can block pirated IPTV in less than 30 minutes. However, the organisation soon realised that the blocks were of little use if the services remained accessible through other methods or if the IP addresses changed.

Although Sunny TV was well known, until now it was not possible to do anything against its owners, and now we find out why: the managers had taken several measures to avoid police persecution, including hosting the servers and devices in an abandoned house.

At first glance, what appeared to be a house that no one had lived in for years was the center of operations of one of the most successful pirate organizations; According to police, the market value of Sunny TV was $31.2 million before being shut down. During the operation, agents arrested two people; in addition to seizing hundreds of devices linked to the hack, including 72 TV connect devices, 72 video encoders, servers, network devices and smartphones.

These devices were used to capture broadcasts from different services, aggregate the data on the server, and host it on services like Cloudflare for access from anywhere in the world. The modified devices were sold with pre-configured access to these services, and users could also choose to download an app onto their device.