The highly illegal but very popular media streaming site Fmovies and its associated network of pirated movie and TV show sites have been shut down. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), a global coalition of studios and entertainment companies including Disney, NBCUniversal and MGM, announced the takedown of the illegal streaming site, along with several other websites including bflixz, flixtorz, movies7, myflixer and aniwave. and according to its video hosting provider vidsrc.to The Hollywood Reporter.
The Fmovies operation was based in Vietnam. Hanoi police arrested two unidentified men pending charges related to a pirate media empire.
Fmovies was launched in 2016 and from January 2023 to June 2024 had over 6.7 billion visits, 374 million monthly visits. Data from SimilarWeb ranked Fmovies as the 280th most visited website in any category and the 11th most popular TV, movies and streaming website. ACE called the Fmovies syndicate “the world’s largest piracy ring”. statement released earlier today.
The site even has it its own subreddit users can request and share links to TV shows and movies. As the authorities shut down the operators of Fmovies, Reddit users began posting notices that the syndicate’s streaming sites were down or had begun to shut down. As news of Fmovies’ demise began to surface, users began asking for suggestions of alternative piracy sites.
ACE Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin called the shutdown and arrests “a stunning victory for actors, crews, directors, studios and the creative community around the world.”
Walls are closing around some of the internet’s bigger media pirates. ACE claimed an earlier victory after the August 15 shutdown of website aniwave for illegal anime streaming. Another pirate site, fboxz.to, was shut down after a few days and posted a farewell note on its homepage telling its visitors, “Pay for movies/shows, we have to do this to show our respect to the people behind the movies.” shows,” he said TorrentFreak.
The past month has not been kind to online pirates either. The US extradited earlier this month Kim DotcomThe founder of Megaupload, the poster child for online piracy in the 2010s, is to face charges for running a video upload empire from New Zealand.
Authorities arrested Dotcom at his New Zealand home in 2012 on charges of racketeering, copyright infringement, money laundering and copyright distribution. His indictment alleges that Megaupload caused $500 million in damages and received $175 million in advertising and subscription revenue from the illegal media library.
