Vietnam indicts seven alleged operators of anime piracy giant HiAnime

Vietnam's Supreme People's Procuracy has indicted seven people accused of running HiAnime, an anime piracy site with more than 150 million visits a month. They will stand trial before the Hanoi People's Court. According to the indictment, the group earned 12.85 million USDT, a dollar-pegged stablecoin worth about $12.85 million, from pop-up ads placed through the advertising network PropellerAds. No trial date has been announced.

Who is charged

The case was reported by Bảo vệ pháp luật, the procuracy's own newspaper, and by TorrentFreak. Four alleged ringleaders, Nguyễn Đình Minh Khoa, Nguyễn Trung Anh, Nguyễn Hoàng Thanh and Nguyễn Đình Xuân, face charges of copyright infringement and money laundering. Three others are charged with copyright infringement only. Prosecutors say the defendants confessed. Salaried staff who copied films were not charged, because investigators concluded they did not fully understand the films' copyright status.

According to the indictment, Khoa came up with the idea in early 2019. He bought more than 100 domain names through Namecheap and handled search optimization. Trung Anh ran the servers, Xuân built the sites and their content system, and Thanh designed them and split the profits. Between mid-2019 and March 2026, the network allegedly offered 26,000 TV series and 7,500 anime titles under the HiAnime brand, earlier known as Zoro.to and Aniwatch, and also Sflix/Myflixerz and 9animetv.

The case began with a complaint filed on 7 May by Rouse, the law firm that represents the Motion Picture Association (MPA) in Vietnam. Police announced the charges in July, after acting on intelligence from U.S. Homeland Security Investigations and the MPA's anti-piracy arm ACE. HiAnime itself had shut down in March with a short goodbye message.

Where the money went

Prosecutors say Khoa negotiated with PropellerAds over Skype and Telegram and placed its ad code on the sites, so pop-up windows opened when people started a film. The network paid by traffic, in USDT. Khoa received 2.5 million USDT from 2020, and Thanh received 10.35 million USDT through wallets on Binance from September 2023. Each of the four ringleaders made at least 50 billion dong, about $2 million, after costs that included roughly 70,000 USDT a month for servers.

The laundering charge covers what happened next. The defendants allegedly moved the USDT through several wallets, sold it for dong and spent it on houses and cars: a Porsche Panamera, a Mercedes G63, a Land Rover, a Ford Mustang and more. In February 2026, two of them re-registered their cars to relatives because they feared being caught. PropellerAds has long rejected the MPA's claims that it funds piracy, and it is not known whether the company knew about HiAnime.

The indictment also names the group's infrastructure: servers rented from Evoluso until 2022 and from OVH, and storage on Cloudflare from 2023 until March 2026. The MPA had tried to unmask HiAnime's operators through U.S. court subpoenas sent to Cloudflare in 2024 and 2025.

A test case for Vietnam

The trial matters beyond one site. In May, the U.S. Trade Representative named Vietnam a "Priority Foreign Country" for failing to deter piracy, which opened a Section 301 investigation and the possibility of tariffs. Vietnam cited the HiAnime prosecution in its defense. Washington's complaint is that earlier cases ended softly: two operators of Fmovies, once the largest pirate streaming network, received suspended sentences. The Hanoi court will now show whether that changes.

For viewers, the case shows how such sites pay for themselves: HiAnime was free because every visit fed an ad network. Ads on illegal streaming sites in general have a history of carrying malware. In March 2025, Microsoft described a campaign that started on illegal streaming sites and reached nearly one million devices with password-stealing software. Neither Microsoft nor the Vietnamese indictment connects that campaign to HiAnime or PropellerAds. Closures of big pirate sites, such as the recent shutdown of Streamed, also leave room for copycat sites, and the MPA has asked U.S. officials to act against those too.