Until today, Kickass Torrents (KAT) was one of the most visited websites on the internet and brought in tens of millions of dollars a year in advertising.
Now, the website is no more.
It has disappeared from the internet and its 30-year-old alleged founder and operator, Ukranian Artem Vaulin, has been arrested and is facing extradition to the United States.
The domain names KAT used — and there are several — are in the process of being seized by the US Government.
It was the result of years of investigation by Jared Der-Yeghiayan, a special agent with the US Department of Homeland Security.
While he is not exactly a household name, he is the same investigator who brought down Ross Ulbricht, the person behind the infamous online drug marketplace, Silk Road.
The investigation was done both online and in meat space (the real world), and was a mixture of old-school police work and top-of-the-line digital forensics.
Mr Der-Yeghiayan laid out his evidence in the criminal complaint, filed to the US District Court of Illinois.
Here is how he tied Artem Vaulin to KAT:
Follow the (advertising) money
KAT sold adverts around its pirated content, and it is estimated the revenue brought in around $17 million a year.
It was that need to make money that opened KAT up for infiltration.
In late 2015, an undercover agent — known as UC-1 — who worked for the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) emailed KAT to enquire about advertising on the site.
The undercover agent said the advert was for a US study program and they were after an ad run of five days.
KAT said it would cost $300 a day to run the advert, with a total cost of $1,500.
Nearly a month after the initial enquiry, a KAT representative provided the agent with banking information to transfer the money for the advertising deal.
The bank account was in Latvia, in the name of “GA Star Trading”.
A few months later, the IRS transferred the money and the ad went live.
The IRS tried to organise a few more ad campaigns, and was given bank accounts in Estonia, as well as a Russian payment system, but the Latvian account had already given the US Government a way in.
With that information, agents requested the account holder information under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT).
It is a set of agreements between countries to share and swap information with the aim of enforcing various laws.
The agents discovered the account had received 28,411,357 euros in deposits from August 2015 and March 2016.
Torrent sites have long held that they are compliant with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and therefore also protected by its safe harbor provisions. Because sites like KickassTorrents only allow users to provide links to pirated content, the defense goes that those sites should not be held responsible for what users do with that freedom. However, authorities say Vaulin’s operation often skirted takedown requests using lengthy demands.
When asked by Hollywood movie studios or other intellectual property holders to remove links to copyrighted content on the site, KickassTorrents is said to have rejected takedown notices based on meeting an entire list of sometimes arcane and confusing criteria, writes Ars Technica. Demands included showing proof of both copyright ownership and that the content in question is in fact legally copyrighted, but KickassTorrents never appeared to indicate which one of those requests was not fulfilled when responding to notices. The federal affidavit says KickassTorrents was also taking in more than $16 million in advertising revenue as of this year.