The Investigative Police (PDI) arrested 16 people in the Metropolitan Region and La Araucanía, accused of belonging to a network selling subscriptions to pirated television over the internet. The raids took place in the early hours of Wednesday, October 21.
According to Emol, the investigation was led by the Eastern High Complexity Prosecutor’s Office. Four luxury cars and a light aircraft were seized during the operations, and 150 accounts at 11 banks were frozen.
The organization operated the Ultra IPTV, Mega IPTV and Ultra IPTV Latinoamérica platforms. IPTV stands for internet protocol television, meaning television signals transmitted over the internet instead of cable or satellite.
Eastern Regional Prosecutor Lorena Parra explained that the group stole signals from legal platforms, decoded them and sold them in television packages through front companies, fake companies or nonexistent companies. Those affected include DirecTV and the Fox conglomerate, which filed complaints.
The figures vary by source. PDI Director General Eduardo Cerna reported that the frozen accounts had handled more than $4,500 million and that assets worth more than $1,500 million had been seized. Emol reported around US$4 million in those accounts and transactions totaling more than $900 million between June 2021 and July 2022 alone.
Cerna described the organization as "a criminal structure made up of family, friends and acquaintances" that allegedly operated under false identities from 2018. Emol, however, dates the start of its activities to 2019. Parra estimated that around 400 thousand people had subscribed to these services since 2018.
The operations were carried out by the Intellectual Property Crimes Investigation Brigade (Bridepi) and the Money Laundering Investigation Brigade (Brilac). According to Emol, those arrested include the main suspect in stealing the content and retransmitting it from his own servers.
High Complexity Prosecutor Constanza Encina, who led the investigation launched in 2019, said the servers had been located and the websites taken down. She said this was the first time a guarantee court had ordered such a precautionary measure in a criminal case. Anyone visiting the pages today will see a blocking notice from the Undersecretariat of Telecommunications (Subtel).
Encina added that the platforms presented themselves as lawful services, issued a form of invoice and that some customers even filed complaints with the National Consumer Service (Sernac). This could constitute fraud, which will be investigated later. The prosecutors said the circumstances of those who consumed the content would also be investigated.
The legal action stems from cases brought by the Alliance Against Audiovisual Piracy, with support from Mercado Libre, over violations of Intellectual Property Law 17,336 and money laundering under Law 19,913. The sources do not report a case number.
The case is at the arrest stage. The 16 defendants will attend a detention review hearing at the 4th Guarantee Court of Santiago, where a judge will review the legality of the arrests. There, prosecutors will formally notify them that they are under investigation for violations of the Intellectual Property and Telecommunications laws, criminal association, money laundering and tax offenses, as they had not registered the start of their business activities with the tax authorities.
