When you’re the owner of the world’s biggest torrent-sharing site, the last thing you’d expect to land you in trouble would be a totally legitimate (and legal) purchase via iTunes.But that’s what happened to 30-year-old Ukrainian Artem Vaulin a.k.a “tirm,” owner and operator of KickassTorrents (KAT.cr), who was yesterday arrested and charged in Poland for criminal copyright infringement and money laundering. He’s been accused of illegally reproducing and distributing hundreds of millions of copies of movies, video games, TV shows and music albums totalling more than $1 billion. The US is now waiting to extradite him.
The fake ad
From November 2015, an undercover IRS Special Agent spoke with a KAT representative about hosting an advertisement that would direct visitors to an undercover site. An agreement was made and the ad, which purportedly advertised a program to study in the United States, would be placed on individual torrent listings for $300 per day. When it finally went live on March 14th 2016, a link appeared underneath the torrent download buttons for five days. It was a short campaign, but it was enough to link KAT to a Latvian bank account, one that received €28 million ($31 million) in deposits — mainly from advertising payments — between August 2015 and March 2016.
This back-and-forth also enabled investigators to identify an important point of contact: the email address pr@kat.cr. Not only was it linked to website enquiries, it was the email associated with KAT’s social media presences such as Facebook. Agents were able to obtain records from Facebook that showed the “official.KAT.fanclub.” page was almost certainly associated with KAT.
The bitter Apple for Tirm:
From WHOIS, Jared got the email address of Vaulin which he was able to match with an Apple email account. Vaulin was using the same account to his KAT-related operations. Now the funnier part comes. The data provided by Apple on July 31, 2015, disclosed that the same Apple account was used to make iTunes purchases.
FaceBook Analyzed IP Address Logs:
The IP address logs were analyzed to conclude that the same IP was used to operate the KAT’s Facebook page, for which the data was provided by Facebook. It’s quite ironical to hear that the founder of the world’s largest pirated content hosting website was arrested by tracking the legal purchases by him. This time, the security agencies nailed it.
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