The notorious media streaming platform, Fmovies, along with a network of affiliated pirated movie and TV show websites, has been shut down. This takedown was spearheaded by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), a global coalition of movie studios and entertainment giants such as Disney, NBCUniversal, and MGM, according to a report from The Hollywood Reporter.
The Fmovies operation, based in Vietnam, saw the arrest of two men in Hanoi, who are currently awaiting charges related to their involvement in the pirated media empire.
Since its launch in 2016, Fmovies had become immensely popular, attracting 374 million monthly visits and amassing over 6.7 billion visits from January 2023 to June 2024. Data from SimilarWeb ranked Fmovies as the 280th most visited website globally and the 11th most popular in the TV, movies, and streaming category. ACE has labeled the Fmovies network as “the largest piracy ring in the world,” in a statement released earlier today.
Fmovies even had its own subreddit where users could request and share links to TV shows and movies. As authorities began to close in, Reddit users started noticing that the syndicate’s streaming sites were no longer functioning or were beginning to shut down. As news of Fmovies’ downfall spread, users began searching for alternative piracy sites.
ACE Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin hailed the shutdown and arrests as “a stunning victory for casts, crews, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe.”
This isn’t the only recent victory against online media piracy. On August 15, ACE celebrated another success with the closure of the illegal anime streaming website aniwave. Shortly after, another pirate site, fboxz.to, shut down and posted a farewell message urging visitors to “Please pay for the movies/shows, that’s what we should do to show our respect to people behind the movies/shows,” as reported by TorrentFreak.
The past month has been particularly challenging for online pirates. Earlier this month, the U.S. extradited Kim Dotcom, the infamous founder of Megaupload, from New Zealand to face charges for his role in operating a massive video downloading empire.
Dotcom was arrested in 2012 at his New Zealand home on charges including racketeering, copyright infringement, money laundering, and copyright distribution. His indictment alleges that Megaupload caused $500 million in damages and earned $175 million in advertising and subscription revenue from its illegal media library.
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