The service illegally distributing movies, TV series and entertainment programs on the Internet operated for at least three years. Film distributors and program broadcasters estimate losses of at least PLN 15 million Malopolska police officers report.
The investigation has been conducted by the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin since mid-2020. At the beginning of October this year, officers of the Department for Combating Economic Crime of the Regional Police Headquarters in Krakow, together with officers of the Criminal Department of the Regional Police Headquarters in Katowice, made arrests in Gdynia and Lower Silesia district. Among the detainees is the founder of the ogladaj.to website, an IT specialist operating the site, and an intermediary selling access codes to the paid version of the site.
Police report that a search of the suspects’ residences secured money in various currencies, funds in accounts, luxury cars, as well as high-quality sports equipment, silver bars and gold collector coins. The total value of the secured property amounts to about 1 million PLN. The security was made against future penalties.
According to the latest Deloitte report on piracy on the Internet, the audiovisual market loses nearly PLN 3 billion annually on this phenomenon, and the losses to the state treasury amount to as much as PLN 1.86 billion.
– Each such a successful police action shows that officers are increasingly better prepared to act against online crime, despite the fact that criminals seeking to evade responsibility are reaching for increasingly complex models of operation. At the same time, it should be noted that multi-layered concealment of real data leads to protracted and increased costs of proceedings, and existing legal solutions have a very limited scope of action. For more effective protection of intellectual property, it is necessary to implement mechanisms such as blocking sites and illegal live broadcasts. Such a level of protection is already in place in many European countries,” says Teresa Wierzbowska, president of the Sygnal Association, which fights piracy.
This is another success for the Police this year in the fight against intellectual property violations on the Internet. At the beginning of the year, the zalukaj.vip website was shut down, and in September more than a dozen sites with links to illegally shared movies, series, games and books disappeared from the net – including Vorek.pl, Pobieramy24.xyz, Exsites.pl, Darkmachine.pl, Sdcv.pl, Files4You.org, vTorrent.pl and Warezik.eu.
