The owner of the largest torrent tracker in the world is arrested

    US authorities plan to split a number of KickassTorrents domains, and the owner will be extradited to America





    Now the largest torrent tracker in the world is the resource KickassTorrents. Site attendance is over a million people a day. The monthly audience of the project exceeds 50 million people. By this indicator, the resource exceeds The Pirate Bay. It is clear that the popular "pirated" resources irritate law enforcement and copyright holders of materials distributed using torrents. The authorities of many countries are trying to fight torrent trackers, and some succeed better than others. So, the US authorities have blocked more than one domain torrent trackers, and now started on KickassTorrents.

    Moreover, in this case the matter did not go off by blocking or delimiting domains. The owner of the resource, a 30-year-old Ukrainian citizen Artem Vaulin (registered in Kharkov), was arrested. A lawsuit against Vaulin was filed in Chicago, USA. He has already been arrested - not in the US, but in Poland. Now the United States will seek the extradition of the owner of KickassTorrents.

    According to the US authorities, Artem Vaulin is guilty of illegal distribution of copyrighted materials. The loss from Vaulin’s actions is estimated at $ 1 billion. “His arrest in Poland ... again proves that cybercriminals can escape, but cannot escape from justice,” the US Assistant Attorney General said. Documents of the case are available at this link .

    In addition to arresting the owner of the tracker, the US government decided to withdraw several KickassTorrents domains:
    • kickasstorrents.com
    • kastatic.com
    • thekat.tv
    • kat.cr
    • kickass.cr
    • kickass.to
    • kat.ph

    This list does not include some site mirrors , including kickassto.co, kickass.ag, kickass.cs, katproxy.is, thekat.se, katproxy.cc, lovekat.org and onion address (the authorities will not be able to remove it). At the time of writing, almost all of these domains continue to function.

    Some users of the resource have already reported problems. In particular, a number of users fail to search the site — an error is issued instead of the query results. True, it is still not clear what this is connected with. Perhaps these are common problems on the server side, and not the actions of the authorities. According to the resource, which shows the statuses of the mirrors and the main domain of the tracker, while all the addresses are working, there are no technical problems.

    The site operates in 28 languages ​​and generates revenue of $ 54 million. Annual advertising revenue is estimated at large amounts from $ 12.5 million to $ 22.3 million.

    An interesting method by which the US authorities managed to calculate the owner of the tracker. One of the law enforcement officers involved in the investigation acted as an advertiser. He managed to find out the bank account associated with KickassTorrents. The court documents indicate that the agent of the US Tax Administration bought ads on KickassTorrents. Its cost was $ 300 per day. The representative of KickassTorrents provided the data of the Latvian bank to pay for advertising. He also asked the "advertiser" not to mention the torrent tracker anywhere.

    After the advertisement was unscrewed for five days, the agent decided to ask for another advertisement. He was offered to buy a banner at a price of $ 1,000 to $ 3,200 per day. The tracker representative again provided the details of the bank account - this time the bank turned out to be Estonian. The US authorities were able to obtain all the data on these accounts without any problems.

    Militiamen studied the history of the transaction and found out that the accounts were managed from Chicago, Illinois, USA.

    In addition, the “decoy duck” was able to receive Artem Vaulin’s email address - this is tirm@me.com. As it turned out, this is his main e-mail, tied to an Apple account. The corporation examined the user's IP address and reviewed the transactions associated with this address.



    “Records provided by Apple showed that tirm@me.com was used during the iTunes transaction on July 31, 2015 with the IP address 109.86.226.203. This IP was used on the same day to log into the Facebook account KAT (KickassTorrents). On December 9, 2015, user tirm@me.com came in with IP 78.108.181.81 for another iTunes transaction. The same IP was used for authorization with the Facebook KAT account on December 4, 2015, ” the lawsuit says .

    The most interesting thing is that this case has nothing to do with the MPAA. Apparently, the case was initiated by the US authorities, not the right holders.

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