Top Movie Piracy Ring Taken Down, Major Studios’ Enforcement Group Claims
An anti-piracy coalition composed of major studios in the U.S. and across the globe is claiming victory against Fmovies, a significant streaming operation based in Vietnam.
On Thursday, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment revealed that it had worked with Hanoi police to shutter Fmovies and affiliated sites, which together made up “the largest pirate streaming operation in the world,” according to the organization. With sites including bflixz, flixtorz, movies7, myflixer and aniwave in addition to Fmovies, the operation attracted more than 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024, ACE says.
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The effort also shut down video hosting provider Vidsrc.to and its affiliated sites, which were “operated by the same suspects,” per ACE. Two Vietnamese men were arrested by Hanoi police in connection with Fmovies and have yet to be charged.
Charles Rivkin, the chairman and CEO of Hollywood trade group the Motion Picture Association and the chairman of ACE, called the action “a stunning victory for casts, crews, writers, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe” in a statement. His colleague Larissa Knapp, executive vp and chief content protection officer for the MPA, said the takedown sent a “powerful deterrent message.” She added, “We look forward to ongoing joint efforts with Vietnamese authorities, U.S. Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Department of Justice International Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (ICHIP) program to bring the criminal operators to justice.”
With governing members including Netflix, Apple TV+, Amazon and The Walt Disney Studios, among others, ACE works with law enforcement domestically and internationally to fight online piracy of entertainment. The group also pursues litigation and sends out cease-and-desist letters. Its international members include BBC Studios, Canal+ Groupe, Televisa, MBC Group and RTL.
Fmovies has been a target of ACE’s affiliate, the MPA, for some time, with Rivkin noting that one-third of its traffic came from the U.S. in a 2024 speech at CinemaCon. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has included the site on its annual “Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy” for several years running, alongside other sites including ThePirateBay, Sci-Hub and 1337X. Per data aggregation company SimilarWeb, Fmoviesz.to was the 280th most popular website in the world across all categories in 2023.
Subreddits dedicated to Fmovies and piracy have noticed the shutdowns in recent days and have been discussing alternative websites. Asked one poster, “Can anyone message me with any decent sites please!! I dont really wanna sit and have to watch youtube all day everyday i was literally in the middle of watching call the midwife when it got removed.”
Said another, “Between last night and this morning everyone woke up to the streaming apocalypse of their beloved sites being deleted by Uncle Sam. Anyone who’s posted a link or name dropped a site on this page congrats it’s your fault.”
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