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.

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.

Read the full article on vpnlab.io: https://vpnlab.io/en/vietnam-indicts-hianime-operators-anime-piracy-2026-3134