A network that supposedly sold legal subscriptions to the pay-TV channel Sky was smashed by investigators.
As the Osnabrück police announced on Wednesday, ten people from Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hamburg and Berlin were found.
Some of them are said to have illegally sold 1300 Sky annual subscriptions for 100 instead of the usual around 700 euros since 2017.
Osnabrück - As early as September 2021, the officers searched seven objects in this context and seized 70 IT devices such as cell phones, hard drives or receivers.
The so-called Cybercrime Central Office of the Osnabrück Public Prosecutor's Office and cybercrime experts from the Osnabrück Criminal Police investigated the case for over a year.
The accused had advertised their offer hidden behind nicknames in Internet forums or messenger services, said a spokesman for the Osnabrück police on Wednesday.
The focus is primarily on the 34-year-old alleged head of the gang from Solingen as well as a 40-year-old from Berlin and a 32-year-old from the Osnabrück area.
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The Sky offer was made available to the 1,300 customers, including private customers as well as cafes, pubs and restaurants, via an Internet stream.
The suspects would have bypassed the encryption code and the otherwise necessary receiver card.
The investigators have now switched off the streaming server.
According to previous knowledge, the damage amounts to 1.3 million euros.
The ten suspects were allowed to stay at large for the time being.
They were now facing imprisonment between six months and ten years for commercial or gang computer fraud.
The platform's customers are also being investigated.
The police spokesman emphasized: "This is no trivial offense." Dpa
