Dutch Fiscal Police Shut Down Major Illegal IPTV Operation, Affecting Legitimate Websites
which reportedly supplied services to many smaller IPTV sellers and served over a million subscribers.
Dutch Fiscal Police Take Down One of Europe’s Largest Illegal IPTV Operations, Arrest Four in Major Crackdown
This week, the Dutch fiscal police (FIOD) successfully shut down one of Europe’s largest illegal IPTV operations, which acted as a supplier to many smaller services. The action centered around a local data center, where 1,200 servers were pulled offline. Many of these servers were allegedly used to serve IPTV, but the action also took down several legitimate websites operated by entirely innocent companies.
The internet is rife with shady IPTV services that offer a lot for very little money. However, these deals often seem too good to be true and, in most cases, they are illegal.
In a major success in the fight against piracy, the Dutch fiscal police (FIOD) cracked down on one of Europe’s largest IPTV operations, which allegedly served over a million subscribers. Although little detail was released about the main defendants, authorities report that four people were arrested. The available information also suggests that GLOBE Datacenter was a key target, as its website and network have been offline for two days now.
When asked by TorrentFreak, FIOD confirmed that it would not release any names of suspects at this point. However, police say that 1,200 servers were intentionally taken offline at a data center allegedly operated by one of the main suspects.
Rare but Significant: Dutch IPTV Raids Result in Entire Commercial Data Center Shutdown
While IPTV raids are not uncommon, it’s rare to see an entire commercial data center taken offline in the process. This suggests that police had information that the hardware and network were almost exclusively used to facilitate the alleged criminal activity.
However, the operation also took down several legitimate websites hosted on GLOBE’s autonomous system number (AS212708), which included many IPTV-related domains and IP-addresses such as nextiptv.org, iptvextrema.com, mercuryiptv.com, and many others.
