Millions of people have moved away from traditional broadcasters and embraced the world of pirate IPTV, where content is plentiful, cheap, and mostly illegal. Pirate suppliers are able to undercut their legal counterparts for numerous reasons, including doing away with irritations such as adding VAT to customers' bills. After attracting attention from tax authorities, 80 pirate IPTV sellers now face a $3.5m tax bill, but the bad news is unlikely to stop there.

In recent years, rightsholders in Sweden have reported significantly increased consumption of pirate IPTV services, and law enforcement’s inability to tackle the problem due to a lack of funding.

Complaints like these are nothing new for rightsholders or indeed anyone else in Europe; when resources are already stretched, it’s inevitable that some crimes will be considered less of a priority than others.

But while there’s insufficient funding for police to tackle pirate IPTV suppliers in Sweden, resources are available to investigate those committing the greatest crime of all; generating money by criminal means but failing to surrender the government’s share of the spoils.

Skatteverket Investigates
The Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket) is responsible for collecting personal income tax from citizens, and from companies via corporate tax, VAT, and excise tax. Collecting taxes is critical to the functioning of any country since without revenue, public services like policing may find themselves without appropriate funding, leaving it up to the tax agency to weed out tax evaders, pirate IPTV sellers included.

“During 2021 to 2023, the Swedish Tax Agency has conducted investigations against those who sell illegal IPTV to consumers,” a Skatteverket report on pirate IPTV services reveals.

“To identify sellers, the Swedish Tax Agency has made test purchases and also searched for sellers on the internet. The result was about 200 identified retailers, of which 97 were selected for in-depth investigation.”

Tax Evading Resellers Pursued By Government
The Swedish Tax Agency says that to learn more about the IPTV ecosystem, it collaborated with anti-piracy groups Nordic Content Protection and Rights Alliance, which represent the rights of broadcasters and film and TV companies respectively.

Since distributing content is illegal without first obtaining the rights, most popular unlicensed IPTV services are illegal by default. Skatteverket says that it’s therefore unlikely that distributors and resellers of pirate services register or declare their business activities.

In this investigation, the tax agency focused on resellers, most of whom have shifted away from services such as PayPal in recent years in favor of cryptocurrencies, predominantly bitcoin.

“The Swedish Tax Agency notes that the consumer only needs to swipe money to a crypto exchange, which then ensures that the seller receives their bitcoin. For the consumer, who thus does not need to familiarize themselves with how cryptocurrency works, this makes it extremely easy,” the agency reports.

Tax Agency Has Crypto Experience

bottom level, each reseller generates between SEK 5,000 [$4,770] and SEK 1,000,000 [$95,500] but above them significantly higher revenues have been observed.

“In the largest investigation to date, illegal IPTV was sold for over SEK 30 million [$2.86 million],” the agency notes, adding that other crypto wallets linked to illegal IPTV sales show several hundred million kronor.

For perspective, one hundred million kronor is currently worth around $9.55m.

shades of Al Capone!