29 Arrested as Police Take Down Illegal IPTV Networks

European police just dismantled nine criminal networks running illegal streaming services in a coordinated seven-month sweep called Operation Kratos 2.

Law enforcement from 13 countries arrested 29 suspects and identified another 86, carrying out 148 house searches across the continent.

The countries involved span Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, the UK, and the United States. Bulgaria’s organised crime directorate ran the operation, with Europol co-leading the coordination and anti-piracy partners feeding in intelligence.

Operation Kratos 2: How Investigators Shifted Tactics

What makes this round different is the strategy. Rather than just knocking websites offline, investigators went after the entire criminal ecosystem behind these services. The groups deliberately separated their customer-facing sites from the servers actually hosting the content, spreading operations across multiple countries to dodge detection.

The takedown numbers are heavy. Authorities flagged more than 18,000 IP addresses tied to the illegal services, 4,370 piracy-linked domains, and over 126,000 infringing objects. Nearly 400,000 URLs were marked for suspension or removal, with more than 27,000 illegal streaming URLs pulled down outright.

Part of a Bigger Enforcement Wave

If this feels familiar, it should. The original Operation Kratos shut down a network serving 22 million users, and Spanish authorities recently took down an IPTV service with over 500,000 subscribers. The enforcement keeps escalating.

For end users, the bigger concern is what comes after the headlines. Subscribers to these services have already learned the hard way that police can track IP addresses and follow up directly, as Italian users found out when fines started landing in mailboxes.

Anyone streaming through third-party streaming apps should always understand the risks and use a reliable VPN to protect themselves.

Final Thoughts from Troy

Operation Kratos 2 is a major streaming bust with 29 arrests, nine networks gone, and hundreds of thousands of URLs scrubbed across 13 countries.

But shutting down the supply doesn’t touch the demand, and that demand exists because legal streaming has turned into a maze of overpriced, scattered subscriptions. Until the industry makes watching affordable and simple, the next batch of operators will be online before these servers even cool down.

For more details on this story, refer to the article from BleepingComputer and the official announcement from Europol.

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