India leads globally in recognising piracy–crime links; why is enforcement lagging?

For years, millions of Indians have streamed pirated movies, cricket matches, and premium television through cheap IPTV subscriptions and illegal apps, treating it as a harmless shortcut around expensive content platforms. A sweeping new report published this month is set to shatter that perception entirely.

The joint investigation, titled Organized. Piracy. Crime., produced by the Washington-based Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA) and global IP enforcement firm IP House, is the most comprehensive attempt yet to map the full criminal ecosystem surrounding digital piracy worldwide. 

Its findings are stark: what began as bootleg DVD rackets two decades ago has metastasised into a multi-billion-dollar transnational criminal infrastructure that now intersects with drug trafficking, human trafficking, weapons smuggling, and even terrorist financing.

And India, the report makes clear, is not a bystander.

The India Connection: BOS IPTV and Extremist Fears

The report's most alarming India-specific finding centres on the 2024 arrest of Mohammed Murtuza Ali, a software developer from Jalandhar, accused of running an unauthorised IPTV platform known as BOS IPTV. According to investigators, the platform allegedly distributed thousands of premium television channels to close to five million users across India — all without authorisation.

What started as a piracy investigation quickly widened in scope. Officials from the Gujarat Cyber Crime Cell stated publicly that investigators were examining whether the network had been used to distribute extremist or radicalising content through the same unauthorised streaming infrastructure. 

Authorities were also probing links between the accused and Pakistani nationals involved in content distribution, and were attempting to identify the overseas servers used to funnel material into India.

Investigators further indicated that the platform may have been connected to a broader piracy syndicate operating across Pakistan, Syria, and parts of the Middle East — raising the alarming possibility that the same IPTV pipes delivering pirated cricket to Indian households could simultaneously be used to push extremist propaganda at scale.

Piracy as Terrorist Financing: Not a New Phenomenon in India

The report cites that the BOS IPTV case is not an isolated incident when viewed through a historical lens. The report cites a 2009 RAND Corporation study that documented substantial evidence linking piracy proceeds to terrorist financing — with India featuring prominently.

D-Company, controlled by India's most wanted criminal Dawood Ibrahim and designated a global terrorist entity by the US government in 2003, built much of its early financial muscle on film piracy proceeds. The RAND study found compelling evidence that D-Company used revenues from pirated Bollywood and other content to fund terrorist activities, including the 1993 Mumbai serial bombings that killed more than 257 people.

Dawood, believed to be operating from Pakistan, effectively turned media piracy into a terror financing instrument — a template the report suggests modern digital piracy networks are now replicating at far greater scale and sophistication.

The Southeast Asia Dimension and India's Neighbourhood Risk

The report also flags a deeply troubling connection involving large-scale compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia, where the UN estimates approximately 220,000 people are held and forced to work on online criminal operations ranging from telecom fraud and romance scams to cryptocurrency laundering and investment fraud.

These compounds have been described by UN agencies as "polycriminal" infrastructures — capable of running multiple illicit revenue lines simultaneously. The report notes that while the public record does not definitively establish digital piracy as a core activity inside these compounds, the technical architecture — server farms, VPN tunnels, SIM-box arrays, crypto payment rails — is entirely compatible with running large IPTV subscription operations alongside other crimes.

For India, with its large and growing appetite for pirated streaming content and its geographic proximity to Southeast Asia, this convergence represents a strategic security concern that extends well beyond intellectual property enforcement.

Public Awareness: India Ahead of the West

One finding in the report that reflects particularly well on Indian public awareness is the survey data on perceptions of piracy's criminal links.

Commissioned as part of the investigation and covering over 5,000 respondents across multiple countries, the survey found that 67 per cent of respondents in India recognised the connections between organised crime and digital piracy — placing India alongside Brazil (69 per cent) and the Philippines (63 per cent) as among the most aware publics globally on this issue.

By contrast, only 42 per cent of US respondents and 48 per cent of Spanish respondents made the same connection, despite both countries possessing far greater enforcement resources.

The report draws a pointed conclusion from this gap: in precisely the markets that drive the greatest demand for digital content and command the largest enforcement budgets, the organised crime dimension of piracy remains the least acknowledged.

The Bottom Line

The picture that emerges from the Organized. Piracy. Crime. report is of a global criminal ecosystem that has quietly grown to rival the sophistication and reach of traditional organised crime, while benefiting from the persistent public perception that watching a pirated stream is essentially harmless.

The evidence says otherwise. The next time a user in India pays ₹200 a month for an illegal IPTV subscription delivering every cricket match and OTT platform in one place, that payment may be travelling — through cryptocurrency wallets, hawala networks, and shell companies — to fund drug shipments, weapons caches, or worse.

As the report puts it: if it operates like organised crime, launders money like organised crime, and diversifies into other criminalities like organised crime — it is organised crime.