He was arrested the owner of the largest torrent tracker in the world // or "Use bitcoin, Luke"

US authorities are planning a series of undelegates KickassTorrents domain owner and extradited to the US

Now the largest torrent tracker in the world is KickassTorrents resource. Site visitors is more than a million people a day. The monthly audience of the project exceeds 50 million people. According to this index exceeds the resource The Pirate Bay. It is understood that the popular "pirate" the resources of law enforcement and annoying copyright holders distributed using torrents materials. With the torrent trackers are trying to fight the authorities in many countries, and some succeed better than others. For example, the US government blocked more than one domain torrent trackers, and is now started for KickassTorrents.

And in this case, the matter has not been locked or razdelegirovaniem domains. resource owner was arrested - 30-year-old citizen of Ukraine Artem Vaulin (registered in Kharkov). The lawsuit against Vaulina was filed in the US Chicago. He has already been arrested - and not in the United States and in Poland. Now the United States will seek extradition KickassTorrents owner.

According to US authorities, Artem Vaulin guilty of illegal distribution of copyrighted material. Loss on Vaulina actions estimated at $ 1 billion "His arrest in Poland ... again proves that cybercriminals can get away, but they can not escape justice," -. Assistant US Attorney General said. Documents things available at this link .

In addition to the arrest of the owner of the tracker, the US government decided to flaw multiple domains KickassTorrents:

kickasstorrents.com
kastatic.com
thekat.tv
kat.cr
kickass.cr
kickass.to
kat.ph 

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

Some resource users have already expressed concerns. In particular, a number of users it is impossible to carry out a search on the site - instead of the results of the query issued by mistake. True, it is unclear what it is connected. Perhaps this is the usual problems on the server side rather than the authorities. According to the resource, which indicates the status of the mirrors and the primary domain tracker until all addresses work, there are no technical problems.

The site operates in 28 languages ​​and revenue of $ 54 million. The annual advertising revenue is estimated to be large amounts of $ 12.5 million to $ 22.3 million.

An interesting method by which the US authorities were able to calculate the tracker holder. One of the law enforcement officers involved in the investigation, acted as an advertiser. He was able to identify the bank account associated with KickassTorrents. The court documents indicate that the US tax administration agent bought advertising on KickassTorrents. Its cost was $ 300 per day. The representative provided data KickassTorrents Latvian bank payment for advertising. He also asked for "advertiser" is not mentioned anywhere on the torrent tracker.

After advertising unscrew the five days, the agent decided to ask other advertising. He offered to buy a banner for the price from $ 1000 to $ 3200 per day. The representative of the tracker again provided details of the bank account - this time the bank was in Estonian. US authorities have been able to easily obtain all the data on these accounts.

Law enforcers have studied the history of the transaction and found that the accounts are managed from Chicago, Illinois, USA.

In addition, "decoy duck" and managed to get the e-mail address Artema Vaulina - it [email protected]. As it turned out, this is its main e-mail, tied to the Apple account. The Corporation reviewed the user IP-address and scanned the transaction associated with that address.

"The records provided by Apple's, showed that [email protected] used in conducting transactions on iTunes July 31, 2015 with the IP address 109.86.226.203. This IP is used on the same day to log on to Facebook KAT (KickassTorrents) account. December 9, 2015 by [email protected] went with IP 78.108.181.81 for another iTunes transaction. The same IP was used for login to your Facebook account KAT 4 December 2015 ", - said in the lawsuit.

The most interesting thing is that this case has nothing to do with the MPAA. Apparently, it was initiated by the US government, not owners.