Any fan of Asian comics knew of its existence. Tumangaonline.com —also known as TMO— has been, since its birth in 2014, the main library of manga in Spanish. Its content was free and accumulated hundreds of millions of monthly visits thanks to titles like One Piece, Naruto, Jujutsu Kaisen, Dragon Ball or My Hero Academia. A few weeks ago, the website suddenly stopped working and its users began to lament. Social media was filled with criticism of the administrators, complaints, and questions about what had happened. This Wednesday, the National Police has cleared up the doubts: it has reported the arrest in Almería of the three computer engineers who had set up this network for pirated content distribution, with which they had obtained revenues of more than four million euros. Accused of a continuous crime against intellectual property, after being brought before the court, all have been released.
The arrested individuals, who are close to 40 years old, have a legal business creating websites and other internet services. In parallel, they had created the Tumangaonline.com website and the platform for its viewing (zonatmo.com), which, according to the Similarweb service, accumulated 33 million visits in March alone. On it, they uploaded, without permission, copyrighted content and made it freely accessible to users. These users also had the opportunity to comment on chapters, give them a rating, or create personalized profiles.
The platform featured a large number of comics from Japan, Korea, or China —known as manga, manhwa, or manhua— which included everything from classic works to recent and popular series. All were unofficially translated into Spanish thanks to a community of collaborators. And they were consumed by the Spanish-speaking community in Spain and Latin America “causing serious harm to rights holders, publishers, translators, and the cultural industry as a whole,” according to the National Police.
Access to the website was free for anyone, but it was full of advertising that appeared in pop-up windows. That was the business model: the site administrators charged for each window that appeared to consumers. “It cost the user nothing to access the material and they only had to deal with annoying ads, but in return, those responsible made a lot of money from it,” explain investigation sources. Thanks to this system, the detainees were able to earn up to four million euros in just over a decade. They camouflaged the income among other legal earnings of their company and even paid taxes on them. Most of the advertising shown was oriented towards pornography, “with the consequent social problems it generated, since many of the users were minors,” as explained by the police.
“Its elimination represents a significant step to address the massive copyright infringement affecting creators and publishers worldwide,” the Korean organization Copyright Overseas Promotion Association (Association for the Promotion of Copyright Abroad), which filed a complaint with the police, reported in a statement. The entity fights piracy and represents the main rights holders in the audiovisual and publishing industries of the Asian country, such as Kakao and Webtoon. “Copyright infringement perpetrated by these illegal and malicious websites can be addressed more effectively when the public and private sectors actively cooperate internationally,” emphasizes Itae Choi, executive director of COA, in the document. However, although the main TMO site and other related websites have been disconnected, other operations, such as Lectortmo.vip and Lectormangaa.com, remain operational.
400,000 euros in cryptocurrencies
The operation began in the summer of 2025 after the complaint from the Korean COA. “When we investigated, we saw that what they were saying was real and that Tumangaonline.com did not have the rights for the distribution of those manga,” highlights one of the investigators, who indicates that already in the first inquiries they discovered that it was the largest online manga repository in the Spanish-speaking world. He also points out that the arrested individuals “knew well what they were doing” and that finding them was more complex than in other operations, but they finally managed to locate them in the province of Almería.
When they were arrested, they were preparing a new page to reform the existing one. “Probably so that it would have greater visual appeal and even add other types of content,” the same sources indicate. At the leader’s home, in addition to a technological framework, they found two USB devices hidden inside a wall thermometer that contained cryptocurrency wallets worth more than 400,000 euros. Investigation sources explain that those responsible for the illegal content distribution network maintained a discreet life and did not flaunt their income. After being brought before the court accused of a continuous crime against intellectual property, all three have been released.
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