As part of India's greatest crackdown on piracy, Immadi Ravi, the owner of iBomma, was arrested. The Hyderabad Cyber Crime Police have taken Immadi (Emmadi) Ravi into custody. He is the person who runs the well-known piracy site iBomma.
It is a big step forward in the fight against piracy in the Telugu film industry. Ravi, who has long been seen as one of the biggest threats to Tollywood because of the massive volume of digital piracy, was detained as soon as he got to Hyderabad from France.
The investigation is now spreading to other states and countries, thus he is currently in jail for 14 days. A network of pirates has been identified all across the world. Ravi wasn't only in command of one website, according to the police. He was in charge of a massive global piracy network with more than 65 mirror sites, including iBomma and another site called "Bappam."
Investigators said he was hiding out of the country while still running his digital network, and they uncovered his servers on Caribbean islands. The first test has showed how big the operation is. He put 21,000 illegal movies on his websites. The movies include both new Telugu movies and old Hollywood movies.
The police have already frozen almost ₹3 crore in his accounts, and his illegal earnings are thought to be around ₹20 crore. • The network is said to have supported internet betting sites, which made even more money. Very Advanced Ways to Steal The police added that Ravi was an extremely skilled computer operator who knew how to exploit flaws in movie encryption systems.
People say he went into systems with strong security, got past DRM protections, and used complicated decoding tools to retrieve encrypted movie files. Reports say he routinely shifted between domains and used CDN services like Cloudflare to mask who he was and avoid getting into problems. The authorities also found hundreds of computers, hard drives, and other storage devices, which illustrates how extensive and well-organized the operation was.
Cyber Crime detectives are now watching his crypto activity because they fear part of the money may have gone to accounts in other countries. A Big Win for Tollywood The Telugu film business has been fighting piracy for a long time. iBomma is one of the worst sites because it lets individuals easily publish videos and exclusively has Telugu users.
Producers and industry groups, such the Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce, have called the arrest a "major victory" in the fight to protect the jobs of thousands of film workers and the money that theaters make. Some reports also indicated that Ravi had made fun of the police in the past by saying they would never catch him. The police teams that had been seeking for him for months found this arrest to be far more crucial.
Also read: iBomma Ravi arrested: Hyderabad Police say the kingpin made Rs 20 crore from movie piracy
The CBI and the ED could get the case. Because of the significant sums of money involved, suspected betting links, and possible links to foreign nations, the case may soon be handed to central agencies like the CBI and Enforcement Directorate. Police anticipate they could be able to make further arrests when they learn more about the bigger network.
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