A native of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, Immadi Ravi was nabbed soon after he had stepped off a flight from France late on Friday, 14 November.
Published Nov 17, 2025 | 3:59 PM ⚊ Updated Nov 17, 2025 | 3:59 PM
Ravi's network spanned France, the Netherlands, Dubai, Myanmar and the Caribbean, switching domains faster than enforcement agencies could track.
Synopsis: Police raided Ravi’s flat in Kukatpally a little after he had landed in Hyderabad, seizing laptops, encrypted drives, editing tools and HD copies of unreleased films. His cryptocurrency accounts are now under a forensic microscope.
In a breakthrough in dismantling the movie piracy underworld, Hyderabad Police have finally put the brakes on iBomma’s long, destructive run.
The man at the heart of the operation — Immadi Ravi, the elusive mastermind behind the notorious movie piracy iBomma network — is now behind the bars, thanks to a meticulously coordinated operation by the Cyberabad CCS and Cybercrime Wing.
Announcing the arrest on Monday, 17 November, Hyderabad Police Commissioner VC Sajjanar said the breakthrough would “greatly benefit an industry that has bled crores because of piracy.”
The film fraternity agreed. A star-studded delegation — SS Rajamouli, Chiranjeevi, Nagarjuna, Dil Raju, Suresh Babu — dropped by to congratulate the force.
Chiranjeevi called the arrest a “loud and clear warning” to pirates. Rajamouli cautioned movie lovers against “walking straight into a trap” by logging into piracy sites that steal their personal data. Nagarjuna, too, warned that “slick cybercriminals turn free movies into expensive mistakes.”
Sajjanar laid bare the staggering scale of Ravi’s empire. “He ran 65 mirror sites. Block one, he opened another. His hard disk carried 21,000 films — everything from The Godfather to last week’s releases,” he said.
Most chilling of all: “He sat on the personal data of 50 lakh users. That data was sold to cybercrime syndicates, causing losses worth thousands of crores to the unsuspecting people.”
Ravi’s arrest was nothing short of dramatic. A native of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, he was nabbed soon after he had stepped off a flight from France late on Friday, 14 November, ending a cat-and-mouse game played across multiple continents.
A B.Sc. computer graduate, he used fake identities to secure PAN cards and driving licences in Maharashtra. When the heat intensified, he renounced his Indian citizenship and obtained a passport from Saint Kitts and Nevis, an island nation in the Caribbean.
The case was registered on 5 June 2025, when the TFCC complained about leaks of Single and HIT: The Third Case. What began as a routine inquiry soon snowballed into a globe-spanning chase.
Police raided Ravi’s flat in Kukatpally a little after he had landed in Hyderabad, seizing laptops, encrypted drives, editing tools and HD copies of unreleased films. His cryptocurrency accounts are now under a forensic microscope.
Ravi’s capture followed a string of earlier arrests that began unravelling the network. On 29 September 2025, five operatives were picked up across states:
On interrogation, Ravi admitted he had been running iBomma since 2019, earning “hundreds of crores” and directing an international chain of operatives spread across Europe, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean.
Launched around 2020, iBomma began devouring films. It became the go-to hub for Telugu piracy, uploading HD copies within hours, sometimes minutes, of release. Its playbook was sharp.
The network spanned France, the Netherlands, Dubai, Myanmar and the Caribbean, switching domains faster than enforcement agencies could track.
iBomma leaked a string of major films — Single, Kuberaa, OG, HIT: The Third Case, Kantara, Kannappa, Mirai, and many others. Some were out illegally on release day itself, hammering box-office revenues in thousands of crores.
A special police team is now mapping and dismantling every iBomma-linked domain. The Commissioner said, “This racket is far from over. We will hunt down every last member of this network.”
He urged the public to be wary of piracy sites.” “Don’t encourage piracy sites. They’re illegal, they steal your data, and they put you in harm’s way.”
(Edited by Majnu Babu).
