More than 120 Terabytes of pirate content were seized; the profit of the organised crime gang exceeds more than 2.5 mln. Euro.

30 July 2010, Sofia, Bulgaria. The biggest operation against internet piracy in Bulgaria was conducted by a team of the Cyber Crime Unit of the General Directorate “Combat against Organized Crime”. The websites nanoset.net, rapidadd.com, 4storing.com and afasta.com, through which music, movies, software, books, enetertainment software were illegally distributed, were taken down and closed.
These websites also offered huge number of paid pornographic movies.

The investigation, which took several months, is a result of a signal from Bulgarian Association of the Music Producers (BAMP) – local group of IFPI. The signal was against nanoset.net, which offered pirate music from the catalogues of the members of BAMP.

The police investigation determined that the users of these websites have sent short mobile number messages, to the total value of 5 mln. BGN (more than 2.5 mln. Euro), to have quick access to these infringing files. Money were taken by the organizers of this criminal activity.
The organised crime gang used several mechanisms to hide the location of the servers with more than 120 Terabytes of illegal files, equal to more than 200.000 CD-Rs. The illegal music was distributed in two ways – via torrent technology and via online streaming through the server of the website afasta.com.

On 29th of July 2010, after a big operation on the territory of Sofia, held under the surveillance of the deputy district prosecutor Hristo Dinev and with a permission from a judge from Sofia Regional Court, were searched collocation centres of several ISPs and seized 18 servers with over 120 Terabytes of pirate content.
From the office of 37-years old R.O., organizer of the criminal operation, were seized 2 computer systems and documents, connected with the criminal organisation.  

The operation is part of the strategy of the General Directorate “Combat against Organized Crime” of the Ministry of Interior and the action plan of the “Intellectual Properties Protection Council” of the Minister of Culture for restricting the intellectual piracy. The civil societies related to IPRs protection actively participate in the activity of the latter.

The operation is the biggest until the moment, as amount of seized information carriers with protected content. The members of BAMP congratulate the Cyber Crime officers for their professional work in defense of the copyright and protected rights. “This unprecedented operation, the amount of seized pirate content and the amazing financial profit of the criminals clearly testify for the tremendous piracy rate in Bulgaria that blocks out all efforts to build successful legal models for distribution of protected creative content online”, said the executive director of BAMP.