How Apple And Facebook Got KickassTorrents Founder Arrested

Short Bytes: The founder of the world’s largest torrent hosting website KickassTorrents is now behind the bars. The cause of his arrest are the legal purchases he made on Apple’s iTunes Store which helped the homeland security department to track him down.

An iTunes purchase may land you in the prison — it is the biggest joke that we’ve heard today. Earlier, we told you about the torrent hosting website KickassTorrents or KAT becoming extinct, and its reincarnation as Dxtorrent.

Following the updates on this subject, we came to know that the social network Facebook and the iPhone-maker Apple were a helping hand in the arrest of Artem Vaulin, the alleged founder of KickAss Torrents.

A special agent named Jared Der-Yeghiayan, who works for the US Department of Homeland Security, was investing his efforts to catch the man behind the operations of KAT. Jared managed to lift the curtains off the hosts of the seven domains of the KAT family: kat.cr, kickasstorrents.com, kickass.to, kat.ph, kastatic.com, thekat.tv, and kickass.cr.

He used the reverse DNS lookup method to obtain the IP address of all the domains which led him to two of the domains hosted on the US soil, the prime ground for the US Police to catch the Vaulin.

Using the website WHOIS, Jared harvested the contact details of the registrant of these domains. The domain name kickasstorrents.biz was registered against the name of Artem Vaulin of Kharkiv, Ukraine.

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.

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.

The future of KickAss Torrents seems to be dicey at the current point of time, even though, it has made a come back with a new name. The Homeland Security department is working hard to shake the roots of the largest pirate den on the planet.

Read the complete complaint filed against Tirm in this PDF file.

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Also Read: ‘Play’ Is World’s First Torrent Website On ZeroNet That’s Impossible To Shutdown