German Cops Just Seized $29.6M in Bitcoin From a Movie Piracy Operation—Here's What Happened

Dresden prosecutors just announced a major crypto seizure: €25 million ($29.6 million) worth of bitcoin and bitcoin cash traced back to the programmer who ran movie2k.to, once one of the world’s largest pirated film platforms.

The Breakdown

The alleged operator has been in custody since November and has now agreed to hand over the crypto and cooperate with investigators. During the platform’s roughly 5-year operation (which shut down in May 2013 after an MPAA lawsuit), this single programmer distributed around 880,000 pirated films.

The money trail: He accumulated over 22,000 BTC by converting the site’s ad revenue and subscription fees into crypto, then converted chunks of it back into real estate holdings—a classic crypto-to-fiat money laundering pattern.

What’s Next

Prosecutors are still tracking down movie2k.to’s “second main operator,” who remains at large. The case highlights how law enforcement is getting better at tracing crypto wallets back to real-world criminal activity, even when transactions are years old.

This isn’t the first time German authorities have cracked down on crypto—they’ve been aggressively seizing crypto ATMs and tightening digital AML/CTF compliance across the board.