Vietnam Indicts Seven Alleged HiAnime Operators Over $12.85M in Ad Revenue

Vietnam's Supreme People's Procuracy has indicted seven people accused of running HiAnime, which used to be one of the world's most visited anime piracy sites, along with related movie and TV sites. Prosecutors say the network earned $12.85 million in USDT from advertising.

Four alleged ringleaders are charged with copyright infringement and money laundering, and the other three with copyright infringement. The case will go to trial at the Hanoi People's Court, with the Hanoi People's Procuracy prosecuting. No trial date has been announced.

The details come from reports on October 30 by Bao ve phap luat, the procuracy's own newspaper, and the state news agency's VietnamPlus. The indictment itself has not been published.

The defendants

The four accused of both offenses are:

• Nguyễn Đình Minh Khoa, born 1988, described as the initiator of the network.
• Nguyễn Trung Anh, born 1993, a programmer who allegedly ran the servers and the copying operation.
• Nguyễn Đình Xuân, born 1993, who allegedly programmed the websites and built the content system.
• Nguyễn Hoàng Thanh, born 1989, who allegedly designed the sites, tracked costs and divided the profits.

Three others are charged with copyright infringement as accomplices: Doãn Thành Luân, born 1992, who allegedly led the team that copied and subtitled videos; Nguyễn Khương Duy, born 1992, who allegedly copied films and lent his Visa card and an e-wallet used to receive the ad money; and Nguyễn Phước Toàn, born 1990, who allegedly ran the Zoro, Aniwatch and HiAnime communities on Reddit.

According to the reports, the defendants confessed during the investigation.

How the network allegedly worked

According to the indictment as reported, Khoa came up with the idea in early 2019, after concluding that existing pirate sites were hard to use. The group tested its sites from mid-2019 and began earning ad revenue in 2020.

Khoa allegedly bought more than 100 domains through Namecheap, paying 20 to 50 USDT per domain per year, and handled search engine optimization. He also dealt directly with the ad network PropellerAds over Skype and Telegram, placing its ad code on the sites so that pop-up ads appeared when visitors watched.

Trung Anh allegedly rented servers from a provider called Evoluso from 2019 to 2022, then moved storage to Cloudflare from 2023 until March 2026. He set up a company to hire staff, who downloaded films from other websites and uploaded them to the group's servers.

The sites received copyright warnings from Google many times, prosecutors say, but the group kept moving to new addresses. Rights holders asked Google to remove about 807,000 HiAnime URLs from its search results, according to OtakuDown's analysis of Google's data.

The money

Between mid-2019 and March 2026, the group allegedly offered about 26,000 TV series and 7,500 anime titles and received 12.85 million USDT from PropellerAds, worth about 315.3 billion dong. Thanh alone allegedly received 10.35 million USDT between September 2023 and March 2026 through wallets on the Binance exchange.

Running costs were about 70,000 USDT a month for servers and about 1.3 billion dong, roughly $53,000, a month for offices and staff. After costs, the four main defendants allegedly split the profit equally: Khoa, Trung Anh and Xuân took 50 billion dong each, about $2 million, and Thanh about 51.3 billion dong.

Prosecutors say the four laundered part of the money through property and cars. Khoa allegedly spent about 24.45 billion dong, including on a Porsche Panamera, a Mercedes G63 and a Land Rover, all registered in his wife's name, and two plots of land. Xuân allegedly bought two Mercedes cars and an apartment in Hanoi, Thanh a house and several cars including a Ford Mustang and a BMW Z4, and Trung Anh a Porsche.

In February 2026, Xuân and Trung Anh allegedly moved their cars into relatives' names because they feared being found out.

How the case started

The investigation began with a complaint filed on May 7, 2026 by Rouse Vietnam, a law firm authorized by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) to enforce intellectual property rights in Vietnam. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) and the MPA, representing eight US studios, confirmed that none had licensed the HiAnime, Sflix/MyFlixer or 9animetv sites, according to the indictment.

The group shut down and deleted its sites in March 2026 as enforcement increased, prosecutors say. Vietnamese police announced charges against the seven in July, as part of the country's wider crackdown on piracy.

HiAnime, formerly Zoro.to and Aniwatch, received 244.2 million visits in August 2025, according to Similarweb data cited by the MPA, before it went offline. Its audience moved to other sites, as OtakuDown found when it looked at the sites that took its place.

The case comes while the US Trade Representative's Section 301 investigation into Vietnam's intellectual property enforcement, opened in May, is still pending.