Illegal TV app taken down by police
AN ILLEGAL mobile application for streaming videos and TV channels, with more than 100 million users, has been taken down in Spain following simultaneous raids in Murcia and Andorra.
The National Police investigation also involved law enforcement from Andorra and Portugal, Europol, Interpol and Eurojust
It followed complaints made in October 2018 by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) business coalition, Football Association Pretoria, the English Premier League and the Spanish football league (LaLiga).
Content subject to copyright was being broadcast via an app called Mobdro, which was available for Android systems and accessible on various web domains.
Officers established that the app made money from advertising both within it and on the download pages, as well as subscription fees for a premium version.
Additional income came from selling its users’ information to a company that provided anonymisation services in exchange for advertising-free access, which Interpol claimed was related to cyber attacks.
A Spanish citizen was identified as the creator of the app and the only beneficiary of the profits.
This person moved to live and manage the app in Andorra, but another three people seemed to be promoting the app on different domains in Spain.
The searches were carried out in February and evidence found in the two raids in Murcia revealed that the pages managed in Spain and Andorra were actually unconnected.
The Spanish version used the Mobdro name but with different extensions, earning money from advertising by forcing traffic to their pages then redirecting it to the original.
As a result of the investigation, access from Spain has been blocked to more than 20 web domains and servers, and the app has been removed from platforms in Spain and Portugal.
The search in Andorra found a wealth of documentation about how the profits were made, nine bank accounts were frozen, and computer devices, two vehicles and a house worth €450,000 were seized.
Investigators estimate the overall illegal profits at more than €5 million.