KickassTorrents Goes Offline As Alleged Owner Arrested
The US authorities arrested the alleged owner of KickassTorrents, the largest site of torrents in the world. Artem Vaulin, a 30 years old Ukrainian, has been arrested in Poland for infringement of copyright and money laundering as the result thhe pirate site KickassTorrents went offline.
KickassTorrents Goes Offline As Alleged Owner Arrested
With thousands of daily users, the portal KickassTorrents was seen as one of today’s biggest torrent sites and has exceeded the popularity of The Pirate Bay. However, the owner of the KickassTorrents website, Artem Vaulin, 30 years old Ukrainian, was arrested in a joint operation by the US authorities with the Polish police.
He is accused of various crimes, such as copyright infringement and money laundering, in addition to aggravating of conspiracy to commit both crimes. According to the official documents, it would be responsible, through KickassTorrents, the distribution of more than $1 billion illegal content.
At the same time, the federal court of Chicago in American city issued the order of blocking the various fields related to the service, hence passing the control to the US authorities. The US government has also requested for the extradition of Artem Vaulin, so that despite being a Ukrainian citizen, he should answer for the crimes in the United States. As well as the bank accounts of the accused were also locked and are under the control of the police.
The prosecutor Leslie R. Caldwell stated in a press release that “Vaulin is charged with running today’s most visited illegal file-sharing website, responsible for unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials. In an effort to evade law enforcement, Vaulin allegedly relied on servers located in countries around the world and moved his domains due to repeated seizures and civil lawsuits. His arrest in Poland, however, demonstrates again that cybercriminals can run, but they cannot hide from justice”.
In its status page, the KickassTorrents states that all the systems are operational, with the exception of India, where the site has been blocked by some operators at the end of 2015, precisely due to copyright infringement charges.
The federal court also ordered the seizure of several domains of KickassTorrents. According to the Justice Department, the site received 50 million unique visitors per month, much higher than the controversial ‘The Pirate Bay’.
Hence, the KickassTorrents became the main destination for those seeking illegal downloads in late 2014 when a police action seized the servers and arrested those responsible for the Pirate Bay, which was the largest illegal service provider of this kind. He returned to the air a little less than two months later. But at the moment, the main portal domain is unreachable, although the several proxies are still in operation.
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