WATCH VIDEO. Police officers from the National Police Headquarters in Lublin have arrested three men, who were charged with illegally distributing both free-to-air and pay-TV digital television signals.
The pirate service offered over 160 TV channels and the police estimate that the men made nearly PLN3.5 million in profits. “We have secured servers, computers, decoders, tablets, telephones and more than 60 storage media,” the police said in a statement.
“During the searches we secured: 12 computers, nine servers, tablets, decoders, telephones, over 60 storage media in the form of hard disks and pendrives, as well as documentation.”
The investigation was conducted under the supervision of the District Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin. The police detained three men aged 30,42 and 57. They are inhabitants of the Lower Silesian Voivodship (province of Lower Silesia).
According to the findings of police officers and prosecutors, the perpetrators via the website broadcast the signal of almost all television channels made available by both digital pay-TV and state television. On this website, they have made over 160 television channels available via the internet.
The offer of television channels consisted in making the signal available free of charge only for a certain period of time, then the person interested in it had to buy an account and pay a fee. The funds obtained from this transaction were invested in the further development of criminal activities, as well as in foreign and Polish companies owned by them.
The action of the Polish police marks an increased acivity on crack-down of streaming pirate IPTV services. Just over ten days ago, a coordinated pan-European police action has closed down an illegal IPTV network serving around half a million subscribers across Europe with an offer of around 1,200 TV channels. Meanwhile, a Greek man was identified as the mastermind of this operation.
(Pictures and video courtesy of Polish police)
