Links between piracy and organized crime have been around for several decades.
The framing first emerged in the late 1990s, when the IFPI raised concerns about transborder smuggling of pirated CDs by criminal networks. Back then, most piracy took place offline.
A terrorism angle was added to the mix in 2003, when the U.S. House held a hearing on piracy’s “links to organized crime and terrorism.” Four months later, Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble told Congress that intellectual property crime had become “the preferred method of funding for a number of terrorist groups.”
In December that year, the messaging made it into a new campaign by the UK anti-piracy group FACT, warning moviegoers that “piracy funds organised crime” and “piracy funds terrorism.”
The most pivotal study appeared in 2009, when a RAND report linked film piracy, organized crime, and terrorism. This movie industry-funded report was not without critique, as it blurred the line between counterfeiting and piracy, while evidence for structural crime connections was missing.
Nonetheless, the RAND study introduced case studies that have been cited ever since. This includes the Barakat Network in the Tri-Border Area, D-Company in India, and the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland, which all reappeared in a new study this week.
Report: Organized. Piracy. Crime.
The new report titled “Organized. Piracy. Crime.” was released by anti-piracy group IP House and the Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA). Despite the long history described here, the report describes online piracy as “a new flavor of organized crime,” not something that has been around for decades.
Or, as IP-House puts it on LinkedIn: “Piracy is not what it used to be. It has evolved into something far more structured and sophisticated.”
While the old counterfeiting references are not completely gone, the new report offers several new insights and confirms that times have changed. In 2009, the largest pirate sites were still operated by people who started out as hobbyists with a passion for technology and file-sharing. The same can’t be said for many large pirate streaming networks that operate today.
Piracy Networks as Organized Crime
The new report cites more than a dozen recent enforcement actions to argue that today’s pirate streaming networks meet the formal definitions of organized crime set by Interpol, Europol, and the UN. The cases come from Spain, Italy, Brazil, Canada, India, and the United States, among others.
The most prominent example is the high-profile European “Kratos” takedown that took place in November 2024, which targeted an IPTV operation that reportedly served 22 million subscribers across multiple countries.
The report mentions that raids across eleven countries found $1.9 million in cryptocurrency, $46,000 in cash, and “drugs and weapons.” The report sees this as evidence that piracy operators now sit alongside more traditional criminal trades.
Several other IPTV operations have also been connected to other types of crime. The Spanish ‘Operation Fake,’ for example, targeted an IPTV enterprise that allegedly combined content theft with cryptocurrency mining, property fraud, drug trafficking, and money laundering.
Italy is prominently featured too, with the report referencing a former pirate operator turned informant who told Italian television that “those who pay for IPTV are funding the Camorra.” These links between IPTV operations and the Mafia are not new, but they remain difficult to verify through public records.
A Multi-Layered Model
A clear line needs to be drawn between hard evidence, such as weapons and drug seizures, and hearsay. However, those who have been observing the piracy landscape over the past 20 years have clearly seen more organized and money-driven operations emerge.
Where pirate sites would previously foster a sense of community, modern streaming operations often use a franchise model, sourcing pirated content and complete pirate site scripts through a “Piracy as a Service” model.
The report recognizes and documents this shift and argues that piracy has adopted a franchise structure that mirrors organized crime more broadly. Among other things, it mentions the 2019 takedown of Xtream Codes, a management platform that powered thousands of IPTV brands worldwide, as a key example. Wholesale operators sold turnkey kits to retail-level resellers, the report says, leaving the core operation insulated when downstream services were shut down.
This organizational structure, where various parts of piracy operators are compartmentalized, was also used by KickassTorrents, Z-Library, and the SPARKS group, the report notes. Importantly, however, it does not connect these examples to other types of crime.
The IP House and DCA report offers a detailed overview of the piracy landscape, moving toward organized and profit driven operations. It is fair to say that piracy is no longer the realm of copyleft or anarchist hobbyists. At the same time, not all piracy operations are created equal, and the cases collected in the report cover a wide range of business models, scales, and degrees of sophistication.
This will be something for policymakers to keep in mind when the report lands on their desks.
Report Calls on U.S. Congress to Implement Site Blocking
After spending most of its 42 pages arguing that piracy networks are now organized crime, the report closes with a policy section directed at the U.S. Congress. Specifically, the report recommends site-blocking legislation, noting that this blocking approach is already adopted by “more than 50 countries.”
In addition to site blocking, the report also calls for harsher penalties, payment-processor obligations, and expanded Treasury Department authority to designate foreign piracy operations as “primary money laundering concerns.”
There is some tension between the report’s threat model and its proposed solution.
The report describes piracy operations as sophisticated, adaptive criminal organizations that diversify across revenue streams. If site blocking works by lowering that revenue, these criminals may shift their focus to other endeavors, such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, and weapons smuggling.
Speaking with TorrentFreak, IP House CEO Jan van Voorn says that site blocking doesn’t answer all problems and that other crimes remain a separate challenge. However, he notes that doing nothing is worse.
“By cutting off a low-risk, high-margin revenue stream, site-blocking targets how organized networks monetize piracy to fund broader transnational activity. It’s not a silver bullet, but a practical tool to add friction and reduce illicit income,” he says.
“Doing nothing leaves a highly profitable channel intact. More broadly, different criminal activities require the right legal tools. Site-blocking addresses piracy, and where additional measures are needed to combat other crimes, those should be considered as well.”
The recommendation comes at a time when lawmakers in U.S. Congress are working on a bipartisan and bicameral site-blocking bill. As a result, the lobbying efforts have clearly started to pick up.
Earlier this week, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) used World IP Day to make a similar site-blocking pitch. In addition, a new MPA-funded study on the links between piracy and cyberthreats in Latin America (pdf) also references site blocking as a potential countermeasure.
Whether the renewed U.S. site-blocking push will succeed, and whether it can address the organized crime or cybersecurity threats it claims to target, remains to be seen.
