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US Feds arrest Kickass Torrents owner

Owner of the world's biggest file-sharing site arrested in Poland and awaiting extradition to the US.

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The alleged owner of Kickass Torrents has been arrested in Poland to face charges of copyright infringement in the USA.

TorrentFreak reports Artem Vaulin, 30, from Ukraine, is facing extradition after US Feds posed as a potential advertiser for Kickass Torrents, the most-used torrent site on the Internet (even topping The Pirate Bay).

In a criminal complaint filed in the US District Court in Chicago, the owner is charged with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement.

Apple handed over personal details of Vaulin after the investigator cross-referenced an IP-address used for an iTunes transaction with an IP-address that was used to login to the site’s Facebook account.

“Records provided by Apple showed that [email protected] conducted an iTunes transaction using IP Address 109.86.226.203 on or about July 31, 2015. The same IP Address was used on the same day to login into the KAT Facebook,” the complaint reads.

The court also granted the seizure of a bank account associated with KickassTorrents, as well as several of the site’s domain names.

Assistant Attorney General Caldwell said, “Vaulin is charged with running today’s most visited illegal file-sharing website, responsible for unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials.”

Vaulin allegedly relied on servers located in countries around the world and moved his domains due to repeated seizures and civil lawsuits.

10 Responses

  1. I believe Vaulin’s error was that KAT was also hosting movie files in addition to maintaining a torrent database; there’s a world of (legal) difference. Nonetheless, KAT’s place in the world will be taken by others.

  2. Quite a few people on reddit who are from the US and UK are unhappy, they use this site to torrent our Masterchef as they can’t watch it any other way.

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