The mastermind of this piracy racket, Md. Asif Siddiqui was arrested by the Delhi Police and various equipment, including computers and other accessories, used in carrying out the piracy/signal theft were also seized
In a major breakthrough, Delhi Police, acting on the FIR No. 243/2014 lodged by Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (ZEEL) and after carrying out a detailed initial investigations raided premises in Kalyanpur area of Lucknow on May 22, 2015 and found illegal tapping and unauthorised uploading of live-content of all popular Indian Television Channels. viz., ZEE TV, Star Plus, Colors, Sony TV etc on pirated websites.
During the raid, more than two dozen workers were caught red-handed, digitally stealing live feed of Indian TV Pay Channels using more than 50 DTH and cable TV set-top boxes. These persons were extracting TV feeds, removing watermarks and uploading them on their sites such as www.Desitvforum.net. These websites are being accessed by millions of viewers abroad in USA, Canada, Europe, UK, Netherlands etc and thousands of dollars are being illegally earned by these pirates causing huge amount of losses to the broadcasters. In addition, there has also been rampant violation of foreign exchange regulations and money laundering.
The mastermind of this piracy racket, Md. Asif Siddiqui was arrested by the Delhi Police and various equipment, including computers and other accessories, used in carrying out the piracy/signal theft were also seized. Investigations in the matter are continuing and more such raids and arrests are likely to follow based on the interrogation of the accused.
ZEEL had lodged an FIR with Delhi Police in Chanakyapuri Police Station for unauthorised streaming of the episodes of various ZEE channel programs within 10 to 12 minutes of their actual broadcast. The modus operandi was that in addition to tapping and stealing live feed of various channels from DTH and cable set top boxes, the accused persons within these 10-12 minutes, were recording video, editing identifiable information, adding their logo and uploading it to several servers simultaneously.
This is the first occasion when an internet-pirate has been caught red-handed in India. Normally identifying individual persons and their physical locations behind their pirated sites is very difficult. It took more than a year-long investigation and digital evidence gathering by ZEE’s in-house IT Security Team to collect irrefutable evidence to identify humans behind the mask of these websites, which were hosted from Sweden.
With the proliferation of Internet enabled devices, Indian TV channels industry has been bleeding badly. According to open-source web-based analytics, this particular group had more than 10 Lakh daily viewers and have been earning thousands of Dollars every day. The targeted customers were mainly from US, Canada, Europe etc.
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