Alex Trelinski
A MAJOR online pirate TV supplier of La Liga football matches has been shut down by the Guardia Civil.
‘Crystal Azul’ had around 78,000 international users who watched matches for free in a fraud valued at €42.5 million which impacted on rights holder Movistar.
The company along with La Liga filed a joint complaint to the Guardia Civil.
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The 37-year-old man behind ‘Crystal Azul’ is expected to be charged with fraud.
He offered up his service via the Telegram social messaging app with clients being given a link to use via digital media players.
Guardia computer experts managed to ‘block and delete’ all the channels in early October and removed all the programming codes deployed by ‘Crystal Azul’.
After downloading the link from Telegram, they managed to find that it belonged to a single user, and he was identified after a search through police databases.
The pirate service administrator announced on October 9 that he had closed his service ‘immediately and forever, because things have gotten very ugly’.
He had already been interviewed at that stage by the Guardia Civil.
