In conjunction with the UEFA Euro 2020 European Football Championships, the Special Unit for the Protection of Privacy and Technological Fraud of the Guardia di Finanza has concluded a new and important operation to combat the phenomenon of audiovisual piracy, called ‘Euro Strike 2020’, through unauthorized transmission. on the internet, the so-called “IPTV” – Internet Protocol Television. The activity originated from Uuefa which, as the owner of the broadcasting rights of the event, reported the proliferation of portals dedicated to the illegal streaming of matches near the start of the European football event. The preliminary activities concerned the identification and accurate monitoring of illegal IPTV and streaming services and resources starting from the inaugural ceremony in Rome on 11 June last. A new articulated system based on latest generation IT platforms was unmasked, powered simultaneously by numerous “content sources” located in Europe and aimed at transforming copyrighted audio-video signals into data streams systematically redistributed all over the world. Singular is the circumstance that, after interrogating individual IT resources, numerous returned the message ‘Xtream Codes Reborn’ on the browser, which returns to the well-known world pirate platform dismantled in 2019. Once the first investigative phase was completed, an innovative tracking system was configured which allowed fully identify all users of pirate flows. On the occasion of yesterday’s schedule, June 17 (where in Italy two matches were broadcast exclusively on Pay-TV), all connected users then suddenly displayed a panel on their devices that warned them that the site through which they were illegally viewing the program had been subjected to seizure and their connection data detected. The managers of the pirate services now risk imprisonment from six months to three years and a fine of up to 15,493 euros; while the end users will automatically receive a significant administrative sanction for an amount up to 1032 euros. The complex and innovative investigation activity, coordinated by the Public Prosecutor of Naples, Giovanni Melillo and directed by the Deputy Prosecutor Vincenzo Piscitelli and the Deputy Prosecutor Valeria Sico and Maria Sofia Cozza, has allowed the seizure and blackout of over 600 IT resources including transmission servers, management platforms, showcase sites and live streaming sites as well as the acquisition of the complete list of identification data of hundreds of thousands of offenses users worldwide. The Guardia di Finanza, in its role of economic and financial police to protect honest operators and to ensure conditions of fair competition, decisively opposes this illegal business that finances organized crime and causes massive damage to the Italian economy to the detriment of audiovisual industry which, in a moment already severely marked by the difficulties deriving from the Covis 19 pandemic, is estimated to have lost over 8000 jobs in the year 2020 alone (FAPAV data) precisely as a result of these criminal phenomena.