Press play to start listening
Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security has arrested seven people accused of running HiAnime, a piracy operation that police say became the world’s most visited illegal anime streaming service before it went dark in June.
Investigators from the ministry’s C03 economic crimes unit and A05 cybersecurity department worked the case for years (PDF) with help from U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, the Department of Justice, and the anti-piracy coalition ACE, according to a statement ACE released Thursday.
Four of the seven suspects are now in custody, while the remaining three are under house arrest as the case moves through Vietnam’s legal system. Authorities have charged all seven with copyright infringement and money laundering, alleging the group built and ran more than 100 pirate streaming sites since 2020 and used them to host over 26,000 pirated anime films. Investigators estimate the operation pulled in roughly $12.85 million in advertising revenue over that stretch.
If you are an anime fan, chances are that you likely stumbled across one of this group’s sites in the last few years without realizing it. For context, the service didn’t start as HiAnime. Police say it began life on the Zoro.to domain, then rebranded to Aniwatch (Aniwatch.to) in July 2023 before switching again to HiAnime (HiAnime.to) in March 2024, a pattern of domain-hopping that let it dodge takedown efforts and rebuild its audience each time under a new name.
HiAnime attracted hundreds of millions of visitors a month at its peak, and for a stretch between late 2024 and 2025 it reportedly out-trafficked licensed platforms like Disney+ and Crunchyroll.
According to Torrent Freak’s report, the platform’s no-cost access to translated and voiced-over anime episodes earned it a spot on two official watchlists: the European Commission’s Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List and the U.S. Trade Representative’s Notorious Markets list.
At the time of writing, none of the three domains were still serving anime content.
- HiAnime (
HiAnime.to)now shows a control panel screen powered by FastPanel, which likely explains why the site is inaccessible.
- Aniwatch (
Aniwatch.to) is offline entirely, returning a “Connection timed out Error code 522” message.
Zoro.todisplays a banner from ACE and redirects visitors to ACE’s official website.
ACE, whose membership includes more than 50 major film and TV companies, has been chasing large-scale streaming piracy operations for years, and it credited Vietnamese police for the arrests while thanking its American partners for staying involved through what it described as a multi-year investigation. The group said it plans to keep working with Vietnamese authorities on future piracy cases.
HiAnime isn’t the only anime piracy operation Vietnam and ACE have taken apart recently. Back in March, the coalition announced the shutdown of AnimePlay, a rival platform that had stored more than 60 terabytes of anime content and built up over 5 million registered users before its hosting infrastructure and domains were pulled offline.
