Chiranjeevi rues Game Changer, OG facing box office losses due to piracy: How HIT 3 leak led to iBomma crackdown
A breakdown of how the Hyderabad police, led by police commissioner, VC Sajjanar, brought down individuals actively leaking Telugu films online.
Actors Chiranjeevi and Nagarjuna, filmmaker SS Rajamouli and producer Dil Raju met Commissioner of the Hyderabad City Police, VC Sajjanar, on Monday evening to laud him for the arrest of Immadi Ravi, the individual behind the piracy site, iBomma. Speaking to the press after that, Chiranjeevi lamented that films like Game Changer, OG, and Kingdom suffered box office losses due to this website. An explainer of how a complaint lodged over the leak of HIT: The Third Case led to the police cracking down on one of India’s biggest piracy websites.
Chiranjeevi rues box office losses to films due to iBomma
Chiranjeevi spoke to the press after meeting the commissioner of police and said, “This individual has caused significant losses to the film industry through the unauthorised distribution of hundreds of films.”
He then brought up films starring his son Ram Charan, brother Pawan Kalyan and actors Vijay Deverakonda and Naga Chaitanya as examples of films that suffered due to the website. “At the beginning of the year, Dil Raju’s Game Changer, or throughout the year, Kingdom, Thandel, and OG, all these films faced severe losses at the box office due to this man,” he said.
Chiranjeevi also spoke about how even as SS Rajamouli attempts to make a film like Varanasi with Mahesh Babu, Priyanka Chopra and Prithviraj Sukumaran, piracy threatens the industry, stating, “Rajamouli is now about to make such a big film. He wants to take Telugu cinema global. At a time like this, piracy remains such a huge hurdle. I must thank the police for understanding our issues and arresting him.”
Pawan Kalyan, who is also the Deputy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, also lauded the police and wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “Arresting the operator of iBomma and Bappam and shutting down these major piracy websites is a welcome development”
The crackdown on iBomma piracy website
On June 5, 2025, the Anti-Video Piracy Cell of the Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce lodged a complaint after Nani’s HIT: The Third Case and Sree Vishnu’s #Single surfaced online on the day of their theatrical release. A subsequent complaint followed after Kuberaa was pirated in a similar manner. The investigation began after that.
On Friday, the Hyderabad police took into custody a key suspect named Immadi Ravi linked to iBomma website. Ravi is alleged to have overseen the uploading and pirating of Telugu films and OTT content on the website. He was picked up from his residence in Kukatpally and handed over to the Cybercrime wing.
Speaking to the press about Ravi’s arrest on Monday, Sajjanar said, “Be it OG or Kantara Chapter 1, Dude or Mirai, we found all these films on his hard disk. He had 21,000 movies stored on hard disks. If a film was released in the morning, by evening he would upload it onto his website. This man, Immadi Ravi, who carried out all this, is a native of Visakhapatnam. He earned over ₹20 crore through nefarious ways and even collected private data of 50 lakh people using his site. He ran 61 piracy mirror websites and also carried duplicate IDs and passports.”
This comes after the Hyderabad police led a crackdown that led to the arrest of five other individuals involved in piracy. The accused were Ashwani Kumar from Bihar, Cyril Infant Raj from Tamil Nadu, Jana Kiran Kumar from Hyderabad, Sudhakaran from Erode and Arsalan Ahmed.
