Predatorgate Victims Sue Intellexa for €8M Over Greek Spyware Scandal
Eight people caught in Greece's Predatorgate surveillance scandal have filed suit against the Athens-based company responsible for the spyware used against them, seeking €1 million each in moral damages.
The plaintiffs, represented by lawyer Zacharias Kesses, had their devices compromised between 2020 and 2021. The group is a notable mix: journalist Thanasis Koukakis, who became the public face of the scandal at the time, sits alongside lawyers, intelligence officials, and law enforcement personnel.
The lawsuit names Intellexa SA and 13 associated individuals, including consortium founder Tal Dilian. According to Kesses, the filings lay out in detail how the broader Intellexa network was structured, who did what, and how Predator was developed, sold, and deployed.
Intellexa is both a specific Athens-registered company and the name attached to a sprawling web of affiliated firms spread across multiple jurisdictions. Together they built and marketed Predator, one of the more capable commercial spyware tools to emerge in recent years.
The US Treasury sanctioned several entities in 2024 for their roles in the Predator ecosystem, including Intellexa SA, Irish-registered Intellexa Limited and Thalestris Limited, and Cytrox entities in North Macedonia and Hungary. Dilian himself, along with his ex-wife Sara Hamou, made the sanctions list at the same time.
Earlier this year, an Athens misdemeanors court found Dilian, Hamou, Felix Bitzios, and Yiannis Lavranos guilty of breaching telephone communications confidentiality and illegally accessing personal data. Each received a sentence of 126 years and eight months, which sounds dramatic until you learn that Greek law caps the actual time served at eight years, pending appeal.
Investigators found that at least 87 prominent Greeks were targeted using Predator, delivered via SMS messages carrying malicious links that exploited Chrome and Android zero-day vulnerabilities. The Greek government has consistently denied any state involvement, a position backed by a 2024 Supreme Court prosecutor's inquiry that found no evidence linking the government or its intelligence services to the attacks.
Amnesty International and other civil liberties organisations remain unconvinced by those denials. Given that Predator is not exactly consumer software, the question of who was actually buying and deploying it has never been fully put to rest.
Greece was far from alone. Spain, Hungary, and Poland were all embroiled in their own spyware controversies around the same period, suggesting Predatorgate was less an outlier and more a symptom of how normalised commercial surveillance had become across EU member states.