Artem Vaulin, alleged to be the founder and owner of popular torrent website KickassTorrents has been arrested and caught red handed in Poland. The United States has sought extradition and also demanded immediate closure of the site for criminal copyright infringement, and money laundering.
According to reports, Vaulin is facing four charges which includes two counts of criminal copyright infringement, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and one count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. While the copyright charges gives a sentence of five years, the money laundering charge will fetch Vaulin maximum of up to 20 years.
Commenting on the arrest of Vaulin, Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell disclosed that he is charged with the illegal file-sharing website, which is responsible for unlawfully distributing $1 billion of copyright materials in the form of movies, software’s and other related content.
To avoid arrests and from the eyes of law enforcement agencies, Vaulin had access to servers located in countries around the world and also migrated his domains due to civil lawsuits. However, his arrest indicates that while cybercriminals can run they cannot hide from justice.
In the meantime, the official Twiiter account of KickassTorrents has not been updated since April 2015. We also saw several tweets which mention that the domain is moved to another one with automated redirection.
Responding to his arrest, US Attorney Zachary T. Fardon disclosed that copyright infringement affects the livelihood of large number of people ranging from artists and businesses.
Imagine, a film releasing on July 29 lands on the torrent site on August 1. What will be happen to producers and stars who have acted on the film. It’s their livelihood at stake here. Moreover, book publishers are largely affected by torrents since almost all the new books are widely available via torrents.
Despite repeated attempts by Police, these cyber criminals smartly evaded them by making use of techniques and various other methods. We need to put a full stop to torrents so that the life of the people who make an earning through various methods are not compromised.
Moreover, a federal court in Chicago has ordered an immediate seizure of one bank account and seven domain names related to KickassTorrents.
As of writing this, none of the KickassTorrents web properties are working and Google also removed their website from the search engine.
