A huge IPTV pirate service with over a million users has been shut down by Dutch police.

A widespread operation by the Dutch Police (FIOD) has reportedly led to a major shutdown of one of Europe’s largest IPTV services, which is reported to support over a million users.

While the name of the IPTV service was not disclosed by the authorities, it was reported to be significant.

This secret IPTV pirate service had a monthly subscription fee of around 10 euros and offered over 10,000 TV channels.

In addition to these channels, the service offered access to an extensive library of 15,000 on-demand movies and TV series, sourced from popular platforms like Disney+ and Netflix. This extensive illegal access caused considerable financial damage.

BREIN announced that the operation affected several hundred thousand households and resulted in an outage of their television services.

The services and companies involved remain anonymous, but BREIN, a local anti-piracy organization, reported that the target organization provided access through third-party providers.

Four people were arrested in the police raids and several business and residential locations were searched.

As a result of these searches, vehicles, computers, bank accounts and significant amounts of cash were confiscated.

This operation took place in various cities in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam, Almere, Enschede, The Hague and Den Helder.

BREIN Director Tim Kuik hailed this operation as the largest criminal investigation into digital piracy in the Netherlands ever conducted by the Dutch Financial Police. Kuik explained the following:

“This is the largest ever criminal investigation by the FIOD and the Public Prosecutor’s Office into digital piracy in the Netherlands. Illegal IPTV is the biggest threat to the legal supply of movies, series, TV and sports broadcasts. In this case, it is a criminal organization behind the large-scale sale of illegal IPTV subscriptions in the Netherlands, among others. In the Netherlands alone, the damage is in the tens of millions.”

Research from the University of Bournemouth has revealed that in 2021 more than 8% of the Dutch population or more than 1 million users will be subscribed to illegal IPTV at an average price of €5.35 per month. This corresponds to a total of 68.7 million euros.

Despite these shutdowns, other IPTV services continue to expand and capitalize on the opportunity presented by a potential revenue stream of €1 billion per year. However, the risks associated with such surgeries are far from theoretical, as this recent surgery demonstrates.

According to reports, numerous IPTV-related domains and IP addresses become unavailable after this operation. As the investigation continues and possible prosecution looms, more details are expected to emerge.

For more information on this story, see the original press release on the Dutch Police FIOD website.

This is not the first time that well-known IPTV services have run into legal troubles or even been shut down.

Legal IPTV streaming options

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If an IPTV service is determined to be illegal, we will notify our users immediately and update reports on our website like this to reflect that information.

Finally the The end user is responsible for all content Access is via free IPTV apps and paid services.

For more information on the legality of IPTV and everything you need to know before streaming, check out our in-depth guide below.

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Pluto TV is another popular free and legal IPTV application used by millions of cable cutters.

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