In March 2018, the MPAA said that the site was the "most popular illegal site in the world", stated it was operated from Vietnam and estimated that it received 98 million visitors per month.
Operator, including using Cloudflare, but there is strong reason to believe the operator is still in Vietnam content is uploaded using cyberlockers from numerous email accounts originating from Can Tho University of Medicine and Pharmacy". In October 2017, the MPAA listed 123Movies (and GoStream.is) in its Online Notorious Markets overview to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, stating that while the site was technically hosted from Ukraine that: "The site takes numerous steps to hide the identity of the In March 2017, TorrentFreak reported that the US ambassador to Vietnam, Ted Osius, had been in talks with the local Minister of Information and Communications, Truong Minh Tuan, about shutting down illegal video streaming sites operating from Vietnam, and listed 123movies as one specific site. In December 2017, the creators of 123movies launched another streaming site dedicated to anime, named AnimeHub.to, which remained online for months after 123Movies's shutdown. During its existence and shutdown period, the site was covered by TorrentFreak regarding its features, uptime/downtime, shutdown, and reasons for shutdown. The video hosters and players it used included Openload, Streamango, and M圜loud. ġ23Movies included HD, HD-RIP, Blu-ray and camera qualities of films. In October 2016, Business Insider reported that 123movies.to was the "most-used pirate website" in the United Kingdom. 123movies.to had 9.26 million worldwide unique visitors in August 2016 according to SimilarWeb data".
In October 2016, the MPAA listed 123Movies in its Online Notorious Markets overview to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), stating that: "The site has a global Alexa rank of 559 and a local rank of 386 in the U.S. It was changed to gostream.is, and then to memovies.to, before changing to 123movieshub.to/is and remaining there until shutdown. The original name, and URL, was 123movies.to, which changed to other domains including 123movies.is before redirecting to gomovies.to and later gomovies.is. The site went through several name changes after being shut down from different domains sometimes the name appeared as "123Movies", and other times as "123movies".