Feds Seize Kickass Torrents Site Domain Names, Owner Arrested!

A Moment of Silence to our Favorite Torrent Site #RIPKickAss

All those behind KickassTorrents (KAT.cr) have finally been arrested by federal authorities. This was confirmed on Wednesday by the United States Justice Department.

The arrest took place after this Pirate Bay failed to meet copyright requirements. They found themselves in a huge copyright debt. KickassTorrents have been used by many Internet users for pirating. They got a very large number of visitors to their website every day.

However, please be aware that their website now seems to no longer be working. The owner of the website was a thirty-year-old Ukrainian man. His name was Artem Vaulin. He was sent to Poland today.  The United States government made sure this happened.

It appears that there are a few proxy sites that are still working. http://kat.cr is one main site that appears to work. It seems it can be used all over the world as can many other KAT websites. Kickasstorrents.com, kastatic.com, thekat.tv, kat.cr, kickass.cr, kickass.to, kat.ph however, have all be taken by the authorities.

Artem Vaulin has since had many charged filed against him.

Here are some of the Criminal Charges against him. For the complete file please refer to this pdf file.

• One conspiracy account for committing money laundering
• Two accounts of criminal infringements of copyright laws
• One account of the conspiracy to commit criminal infringement copyright laws

The federal authorities in the United States have said that KickassTorrent has been responsible for all kinds of damages. The damages will cost well over one million dollars to copyright holders.

Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell has said the following in a recent press release that the Department of Justice sent out:

“Mr Vaulin has received charges for running a very illegal file-sharing website. This website is visited by thousands of users throughout the world. He has been held responsible for sharing more than one billion dollars of materials that have been copyrighted. This is against the law. He did all he can to escape the law by trusting that servers would allow his site to be used in other countries. He regularly moved his websites. This was because there were many civil lawsuits and continued seizures. Authorities arrested him in Poland. This only proves that cybercriminals do everything they can to hide from the law. However, they need to remember that they really cannot hide themselves from justice”.

Not only did Mr. Vaulin experience name seizures for his websites, a court in Chicago has decided to seize his bank accounts. They have also seized the servers located in Canada, Chicago and the United States of America.

A lot of countries around the world have blocked KickassTorrents. These countries include Malaysia, United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, and Denmark.

How KickassTorrents Team Responds to Copyright Infringement Complaints:

Court Affidavit said that Vaulin told them that one of his sites, BitTorrent committed no violation. He said that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) allowed this. However, we discovered that they did indeed violate the law.

Here’s How Authorities get their hands on the KAT Owner:

Not too long ago, an IRS agent decided to purchase and advertise on Vaulin’s website for five days. He did this undercover. He sold on this website every day and received three hundred dollars for his sales.

Authorities in the United States received assistance from Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT). This company was able to locate KAT operations information. They got this information from his bank accounts. These bank accounts received payments from those who advertised through him.

The copy of the KATe website was also hosted by many other well-known torrent websites. One such website also included: IsoHunt. This was used on kickasstorrents. This began occurring around the last year to a year and a half.

With that in mind, the major things that bring people to the original Kat website are a community, support, and forums. This is what is what is lacking in other similar websites.

Along with the charges, a Chicago federal court has insisted on seizing up to seven domain names that go through Kickass Torrents. Kickass Torrents operate as servers in many areas of the word as well as in Chicago. These are: kastatic.com, kat.cr, kickasstorrents.com, thekat.tv, kickass.so, kat.ph and kickass.to.

The complained made by DOJ claimed that the net worth of Kickass Torrent’s is approximately fifty-four million dollars. Its advertising revenue is likely to be anywhere from twelve point five million through to twenty-two point three million dollars. Many also know Kickass Torrents as KAT. It has been relocated to other places to avoid copyright lawsuits and seizures. The following countries have also blocked the website: Belgium, Ireland, Malaysia, Denmark, Italy and the United Kingdom.

The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations and DOJ both investigated KAT. The Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation also took part in this. Authorities have confirmed that another assistance was used to help them in this matter. This assistance came from the Internal Organized Crime Intelligence and Operation Center. The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, the DOJ Criminal Divisions Office of International Affairs, and the Polish Border Guard and National Public Prosecutor’s Office were all also involved in the investigation.

More info About KickAss

Man, I honestly love the site! It has everything I need! Big companies are losing money because of piracy. Yeah, this is all because of money…. of course!

• Traffic of up to 1 Million visitors per day
• Hundreds of Thousands of Downloads per day
• Millions of downloadable which includes of course Movies! Pirated Software, mp3, documents, pirated games and much much more!

See you again KickAss

Next Target….

Next torrent site to be taken down by authorities: Watch out!