Hyderabad police commissioner VC Sajjanar addresses a press conference
Hyderabad: Hyderabad police commissioner VC Sajjanar on Monday, November 17, said that IBomma creator Immadi Ravi stored a large number of pirated movie files on a single hard disk.
Police seized a massive archive of 21,000 pirated films from the accused, spanning Hollywood, Bollywood and Tollywood content, The Godfather (1972) to OG (2025).
“Apart from this, police also seized Rs 3 crore frozen in bank accounts, three mobile phones, three laptops, six CPUs, 15 HDDs/SSDs/pen drives, 10 passbooks, 35 cheque books and 34 debit/credit cards,” Sajjanar said.
Immadi Ravi, 39, who is under custody, operated a piracy ecosystem of more than 65 mirror websites, causing losses worth thousands of crores to the Telugu film industry. He was also found diverting lakhs of users from these piracy portals to illegal online betting platforms such as 1win and 1xbet.
Police said his arrest is a major breakthrough in ongoing investigations into the piracy of new Telugu films, including Kantara Chapter 1, Dude and Mirai, which were uploaded on the iBomma/Bappam platforms within days of release.
According to police, Emandi created the iBomma piracy website in 2019, using his background in web hosting and development. During the COVID-19 lockdown, the platform exploded in popularity by offering newly released films in HD for free, drawing nearly 5 million users per month.
“To evade blocking by authorities, he created dozens of alternate domains, used Cloudflare masking, and hosted servers in the Netherlands and Switzerland. He eventually expanded operations by launching the Bappam website in 2022,” the top cop said.
In an appeal to the public, the commissioner said, “People must understand that piracy is itself a crime and it could lead to crimes far more severe as their data could be shared on the dark web.”
Avoid piracy websites, use only legal OTT platforms and report suspicious activity to 1930 or cybercrime.gov.in
This post was last modified on November 17, 2025 5:49 pm