German police take illegal IPTV network offline

After more than a year of investigation, German police have taken an illegal pay-TV network offline. Ten suspects have been identified in the action, including the 34-year-old suspected leader of the group behind the network.

The German police took the servers that the suspects used for their IPTV platform offline and seized mobile phones, receivers, PCs, laptops, hard drives and other storage media during house searches in Hamburg, Berlin and Bochum, among others. This is reported by the Central Bureau for Internet and Computer Crime of the Public Prosecution Service and the Osnabrück Central Investigation Department.

The police service has been investigating for more than a year, assisted by colleagues in North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Berlin and Hamburg. The group offered a paid IPTV offer on social media, including from Sky Deutschland. In addition, they advertised an offer for ‘cheap and stable television enjoyment’.

The German prosecutor’s office opened an investigation after it received complaints from a pay-TV provider. The suspects face a jail term of six months to ten years for computer fraud. According to the German justice, customers of the illegal iptv platform are also the subject of the investigation. Earlier reports from the Hesse and Cologne police spoke of eight hundred to a thousand customers.