NO MORE FREE ANIME??? — IMAGE EDITED BY AUTHOR

Fall of a Titan: Vietnamese Authorities Dismantle HiAnime Piracy Ring

NO MORE FREE ANIME 🫨?

For years, it felt like a game of whack-a-mole.

An anime piracy site would go down, and almost immediately, a clone would spring up under a new name to take its place.

But for HiAnime — one of the largest anime streaming juggernauts on the internet — the game has finally come to an abrupt and dramatic end.

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Following a sweeping multi-year international investigation, Vietnamese authorities have arrested the operators behind HiAnime, closing the book on an empire that generated tens of millions of dollars.

We will provide a full breakdown of how the authorities took down one of the most notorious rings in the world of digital piracy.

The HiAnime Empire by the Numbers

The scale of the operation was staggering. Operating out of Vietnam since 2020, this single group didn’t just run HiAnime. They built a massive, interconnected web of unauthorized streaming platforms.

According to Vietnamese police, the statistics behind the piracy ring look like this:100+ piracy websites created and managed by the group. 26,000+ unlicensed films and anime episodes uploaded.

$12.85 million in estimated advertising revenue generated over the last few years.

Following the shutdown of HiAnime in March 2026, authorities closed in on the operators. Seven individuals connected to the network were apprehended.

Currently, four suspects remain in custody.

While the other three have been placed under strict travel restrictions as the legal process moves forward.

A Global Coalition Against Piracy

Digital obfuscation scales effortlessly across cheap proxy servers (always has been), but moving those twelve million dollars into the physical world introduces severe mechanical constraints.

That cash demanded a home. (Turning Point)

The Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security recognized this vulnerability. They bypassed the server hunt to target the ad revenue directly. Intelligence from U.S. Homeland Security and the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment provided a complete map of the financial ecosystem.

That ecosystem relied on massive data exhaust. Hundreds of clone sites pumped out flashy banners and sketchy redirects around the clock.

This relentless funnel converted stolen anime streams into 308 billion Vietnamese dong.

The operators funneled that capital straight into personal bank accounts. They purchased local real estate and registered luxury vehicles. This acquisition strategy generated an immutable paper trail across multiple civic registries.

Financial analysts traced those property deeds backward through the fiat banking system. Digital anonymity doesn’t survive contact with standard banking regulations. Four ringleaders now face charges for copyright infringement and money laundering.

Their operational security collapsed under the weight of their own revenue.

A History of Rebranding: From Zoro.to to HiAnime

If you don’t recognize the name “HiAnime,” you likely recognize its predecessors.The operators were notorious for dodging domain seizures and legal threats by constantly rebranding their flagship site.

The site originally gained massive popularity as Zoro.to. When the heat got too high, it vanished, only to resurrect itself as Aniwatch. Eventually, Aniwatch morphed into its final iteration: HiAnime.

With every name change, the site retained its massive global user base, relying on a sleek UI and an impossibly deep library of free anime to keep viewers coming back.

But no matter how many times a domain changes hands, the digital footprint remains.

The multi-agency task force eventually followed the advertising money trail straight back to the group in Vietnam.

“Great Pirate Era” — Sign-Off

In a bizarre and somewhat poetic twist, one of the guy behind the “HiAnime”, smiled when he got caught (his last words were insane), which feels straight out of an anime script; one of the arrested operators reportedly channeled their inner Gold Roger — the Pirate King from the legendary series One Piece — upon being caught.

His reported last words before being taken in:

“My anime archive? If you want it, I’ll let you have it… search for it! I left all of it on the internet!”

While it’s a humorous nod to the culture they profited from, the reality is much less glamorous.

With the domains seized, the servers wiped, and the operators facing serious time, the “treasure” of HiAnime has likely sunk to the bottom of the digital sea for good.

But who knows, he might have secretly put those archives on the internet for real…