Students, employees, part-time workers. And computer hackers in their free time to supplement tips and salaries with “tens of thousands of euros”, looting newspapers and magazines, schedules, TV series and other entertainment content made available free of charge to hundreds of thousands of Telegram users.
The financiers of the special privacy and technological fraud unit of the Guardia di Finanza of Rome, coordinated by the deputy prosecutor of Milan, Eugenio Fusco, denounced 8 people in Lombardy, Piedmont, Veneto, Emilia Romagna and Campania “seriously suspected” of being administrators of 545 Telegram channels. Here every day almost 600,000 registered users have received uninterruptedly and for years (at least from 2020) copyrighted editorial products, stolen with various tricks and put on the secondary chat market.
The denunciation of the Order of Lombardy
The investigation was born in 2020 from the complaint of the president of the Order of Journalists of Lombardy – represented in the proceedings by the lawyer Valerio Vallefuoco – following an investigation carried out with private consultants and aimed at crushing illegal traffic which, according to the denounces, “it creates irreparable damage to the business system concerned and therefore to journalists, employees and collaborators of the robbed companies”.
Certain of impunity
The protagonists reported for violation of intellectual property rights acted on Telegram channels convinced that the platform’s technology would guarantee their anonymity. Instead, the technicians of the Gdf and the Prosecutor’s Office managed to identify the digital addresses with “innovative investigation techniques – they say to the Gdf Command – by crossing a series of traffic data”. So much so that, at the time of the notification of the judicial measure, the unsuspected pirates were “stunned”, trying to deny what the remote technical analysis made irrefutable.
The illicit market
There are two remuneration mechanisms for expert content stealers. The “affiliation”, ie the publication of links to e-commerce sites, which then returned to the organizers a percentage of the purchases made through the use of hypertext links, and the “sponsorship”, ie the publication of advertising banners upon payment of a fee .