Apple Helps Investigators Find and Arrest Founder of ‘KickAss Torrents’

Ukrainian national Artem Vaulin, the alleged founder of one of the most popular pirated media torrent sites on the internet, has been arrested and charged with one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, two counts of criminal copyright infringement, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Vaulin was arrested yesterday in Poland after Apple shared data with investigators that helped them link an IP-address used for an iTunes purchase to one used to login to KickAss Torrents’ Facebook account. According to a criminal complaint filed in a Chicago US District Court, “records provided by Apple show that tirm@me.com conducted an iTunes transaction using IP Address 109.86.226.203 on our about July 31, 2015. The same IP Address was used on the same day to login into the KAT Facebook.” According to Engadget, investigators were also able to link KickAss Torrents to a Latvian bank account that received over $30 million in deposits, mainly from advertising, between August 2015 and March 2016.

US authorities are working to extradite Vaulin, alleging that he has made over $1 billion off of copyrighted movies, TV shows, and music available to millions of users for free.

KickAss Torrents recently overtook The Pirate Bay as the most popular peer-to-peer file-sharing site on the web. As the internet’s most popular source for free downloads of copyrighted material, KickAss Torrents attracted over 50 million users per month. The site was available in over 30 languages, and has been ranked as the 69^th most popular site on the web.

Although US authorities have been working for years to shut the site down and apprehend the founder, Vaulin had, until yesterday, been able to skirt their efforts. Assistant US Attorney General in the criminal division of the US Justice Department Leslie Caldwell issued a statement describing Vaulin’s efforts to avoid police. “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.” Caldwell added, “his arrest in Poland, however, demonstrates again that cyber-criminals can run, but they cannot hide from justice.”

While the main KickAss Torrents domain, kat.ch, has yet to be seized, it doesn’t appear to be in working order. Authorities are looking to seize seven domains as well as the Latvian bank account allegedly linked to Vaulin.