Although BSkyB has stated that its payTV encryption system is uncrackable, the pirates appear to have used a peer-to-peer (P2P) mechanism, with customers' systems polling a legitimate, but abused, card plus decoder setup across the internet.
Using this approach, Infosecurity notes, meant that large numbers of pirate TV viewers could effectively share a single legitimate card.
According to AEPOC - the European Association for the Protection of Encrypted Works and Services - the pirates are accused of having provided illegal payTV subscriptions to nearly 1,400 clients in Cyprus and across Europe between October 2010 and May 2011, generating an illegal income of around 100,000 euros.
The two men at the heart of the operation had reportedly established a network of five servers which distributed the required access codes from single, legitimate but abused, smart cards to the clients' P2P systems.
AEPOC says that the case is one of the largest `card-sharing' pirate operations it has discovered.
The anti-piracy agency adds that, whilst the police have focused their investigation on the men at the heart of the piracy case, they have not ruled out possible action against the pirate's 1,400 customers.
Michael Barley, AEPOC's vice president, said that every pirate activity leaves a trace, be it IP addresses, websites to sell illegal offerings or even payment receipts issued to clients of an illicit card sharing network as in the Cypriot case.
"AEPOC and its members are committed to follow each incident and bring down pirates. Trustful collaboration with the police helps to achieve anti-piracy results in an increasingly short timeframe", he said.
"Nevertheless, the EU legislative framework needs to evolve further to build an even bigger deterrent to prevent audio-visual piracy in the first place", he added.