Europol Traces €55 Million in Cryptocurrency Linked to Piracy

Europol coordinated a Europe-wide operation during Intellectual Property Crime Cyber Patrol Week from November 10 to 14, 2025, with investigators from more than 15 European countries operating from the EUIPO campus in Alicante, Spain. Investigators targeted 69 sites and estimated those sites had a combined 11.8 million annual visitors and developed wallet and service indicators for 25 IPTV providers. Law enforcement traced roughly €55 million in cryptocurrency moving through piracy-linked services and routed on-chain signals to crypto service providers for compliance action. Investigators used OSINT, blockchain analytics including Chainalysis, and link analysis tools such as Maltego to cluster wallets, map revenue flows, and tie domains, hosting, and social signals to operators. Industry partners including Coinbase, Binance, Irdeto, the Audiovisual Anti Piracy Alliance, and the Premier League supplied technical intelligence, platform escalation channels, and content identification. Shared indicators fed into trust-and-safety queues at exchanges and prompted compliance reviews, account freezes, transaction blocks, and other interventions. Thirty investigators worked on site in Alicante to coordinate legal process, technical analysis, and platform outreach, and teams converted investigative signals into exchange referrals within hours. Investigators reported that cryptocurrency was present on about 20 percent of services tracked and that clustering techniques connected service-level wallets to exchange deposit points, enabling custody providers to take action without immediate asset seizures. 

Source: https://theweb3.news/crypto/europol-disrupts-55m-crypto-piracy/

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