Great giveaway; not applying, but give you rep.

Last week the UK's most prolific movie pirates were handed sentences totaling 17 years. With claims in court that the men went to great lengths to hide their identities, just how easy was it to catch them? Papers detailing the investigation obtained by TorrentFreak reveal that tracking the men down was a relatively simple affair. Following a three year investigation by Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group the Federation Against Copyright Theft, last week five of the UK’s most prolific movie pirates were sentenced in the West Midlands. Graeme Reid, 40, from Chesterfield, Scott Hemming, 25, and Reece Baker, 22, both from Birmingham, Sahil Rafiq, 24, of Wolverhampton and Ben Cooper, 33, of Willenhall, received sentences totaling 17 years. The men were behind several interrelated movie release groups including RemixHD, 26K, UNiQUE, DTRG and HOPE/RESISTANCE. “Over a number of years the groups illegally released online more than 2,500 films including Argo, the Avengers and Skyfall,” FACT said in a statement. “The outreach of their criminality was vast. On just one website where the group shared their films there had been millions of downloads.” Speaking at Wolverhampton Crown Court, FACT prosecutor David Groome said that the men had gone to great lengths to avoid being detected. But was that really the case and just how easy was it to track them down? TF has obtained papers detailing the FACT investigation and they reveal that unmasking the men was surprisingly easy. In descending sentence length: Sahil Rafiq – Jailed for 4 years and 6 months In July 2012 a FACT investigator began monitoring Rafiq’s release group, 26K. He found that many of the torrents had been uploaded by a user known as ‘memory100′. It was discovered that ‘memory100′ had a profile on torrent site Torlock and it was determined that the same user also went under other names including ‘sohail20′, ‘hail_alpha’ and ‘froggie100′, with the former laying down the golden crumb. In 2012, Sohail20 had posted on a forum belonging to online retailer PC Specialist. In that post he complained about issues he was having with a laptop. “Could you help me out?” he asked. “Kind Regards, Sahil Rafiq.” Further searches on the name Sohail20 revealed an account on PhotoBucket and a Memory100 logo file named memory100.jpg (now removed). Suspecting they were closing in, FACT’s investigator turned to Facebook and found Rafiq’s profile. From there they found his place of work, a science school in Wolvehampton in central UK. FACT then turned to credit reference agency Equifax which revealed Rafiq’s home address. These details were handed to the police. Reece Baker – Jailed for 4 years and 2 months In 2012 the same FACT investigator began monitoring Baker’s release group ‘HOPE’. In the ‘NFO’ (information) files attached to a HOPE release, it was revealed that the encoder was called ‘Baker92′ while detailing a Hushmail email address where he could be contacted. In another NFO file Baker would make a fatal mistake with the comment “My First Encode Comment & Tell Me What You Think – Plus I Love My Baby Momzie Ria” After finding a post on torrent site Myris.me which indicated that Baker92 had been a member of another release group DTRG, FACT again turned to Equifax. Presuming the ’92’ in his nickname related to his birth year, FACT searched for any person named Baker born in 1992 with an association to anyone called Ria. This led FACT – and the police – to Reece Baker’s front door. Graeme Reid – jailed for 3 years and 6 months During the same month in which FACT investigated 26K, the anti-piracy group discovered from the group’s NFO files that they were affiliated with Reid’s group, RemixHD. An NFO file for the movie 21 Jump Street revealed that the encoder was a person known as ‘Reidy’ who could be contacted at Hushmail email address. Hushmail is known for its security but that has limits – Reid used the same email address on his Facebook page where he described himself as an “encoder” who lived in Chesterfield. FACT then turned to the Electoral Register and subsequently discovered Reid’s home address which was passed to the police. Ben Cooper – jailed for 3 years and 6 months During July 2012, when FACT were investigating HOPE, they discovered an associated user called ‘Cooperman666′ who also used a Hushmail email account. Again, an NFO file for a movie helped to make links, indicating that the encoding had been done by ‘Cooperman’. Subsequent searches revealed that Cooperman666 was also an encoder for release group ANALOG and in their NFO files a Live.com email address was listed for contact. However, that same email address was also used for a Facebook account held in the name of Ben Cooper. That page revealed he lived in Wolverhampton and was born in 1981. FACT turned to Equifax and the credit agency provided Cooper’s personal details. Scott Hemming – 2 year suspended sentence In July 2012, when FACT were investigating 26K, the anti-piracy group identified people who were formerly members of another release group known as DTRG. NFO files examined by FACT listed the encoder as ‘Kareemzos’ who could be contacted on the email address “[email protected]” After linking Kareemzos to other groups including MARGIN, UNiQUE and INSANE, FACT then struck lucky. Posts made on Virgin Media’s support forum listed the same email address as above and it appears that the ISP later revealed that the associated account belonged to Hemming’s mother. Again, Equifax provided the missing link by confirming that Hemming lived at the same house. Conclusion The above confirms that no amount of encryption is a replacement for basic Internet ‘hygiene’. Using the same aliases and email addresses across multiple sites while including birth dates and nicknames that point to real identities is clearly a recipe for disaster. While FACT clearly did their homework and worked extremely hard to get convictions, the actions taken by these men to hide their identities aren’t shining examples of the art. Coming next After FACT and police tracked the men down to their homes, what happened next, what did they hope to find and how could this evidence be connected to their crimes? That article is coming up soon….

New rules for earning Invites Due to the large influx of users, it has been necessary to adapt the rules a little respect. Earning Invites. From now on you will get one invite when one becomes Labrador, one invite when you get Mastiff, one invite when one becomes Rottweiler, and one invite when one becomes Great Dane. Donors have until now had unlimited Invites the donor period. It will also be changed, so that from now on will be supplemented up to four invites, the every time you buy three months donortid. We are sorry to have to limit it, but it is unfortunately necessary. We hope you will welcome the changes.

TL Anniversary Lottery! Friday 25th of December 2015 11:54:56 PM As promised, December will be full of surprises! Christmas, New Year celebrations... What else you may wonder right? Well, it happens that 9th of January 2016 we are getting 11(!!!) years old!! And we decided we should do something about that huge milestone! Did you notice a strange countdown timer under your profile? Of course you did! This is a live countdown for our 11 years anniversary lottery! Clock on it, and get transferred to our lottery page, where you can buy super cool things ranging from iphones to ps4 and xbox ones to apple watches! And when done, make sure you drop from the forum post we made here http://forums.torrentleech.org/index...rsary-lottery/ and discuss about it with fellow users and participants! Lottery will take place 31rst of January 2016, 20:00 GMT! Good luck to all and again, marry xmas !!!

Great giveaway; not apply, but give you rep.

Great giveaway; not apply, but give you rep.

Your signup link don't work; please put the real link.

2015.12.26 - Some explanations and future plans 1. Before the completion of the first novice of members to ensure an open examination before registration, although not notice, but determined to know. 2. The open registration has ended, after all incoming members will experience a novice assessment, the site will open novice assessment. Details http://www.hdarea.co/forums.php?acti...2&topicid=1433 3. The order to open the message did not keep abreast of the people an opportunity to invite the permissions down to Elite User, the end of the New Year's Day, after The long-term shut invited. 4. The website background you can see, there are about 4-5 thousand zombie accounts, long-term without any activity, so the site will keep open the increment assessment. 5. The site will be New Year's Day, the opening of the new donation rules http://www.hdarea.co/forums.php?acti...=2&topicid=930 6. prohibit HDSKY use the site to any official resources, including DIY, pressing , REMUX and all use (only for post resources of this notice); site ban transfer of resources to report. After verified according to the situation, the whistleblower will award at least 100,000 magic or VIP. http://www.hdarea.co/forums.php?acti...2&topicid=1434 7. Site permanent recruitment notice , please want to join the staff contact the above format HDArea

site is now Free Leech Ends Sat, 26 Dec 2015 20:13:03 +0000

Christmas Competitions Since Christmas is here we have two competitions: First one is a contest to look for the best Christmas member profile on PTN. Beg, borrow or steal ideas and make your profile truly stand out. Best Christmas Designed User Page Second one is about tree, Christmas Tree. All you need to do is send us a picture of your Christmas tree at home including your user name and date on a piece of paper. Christmas Tree Competition Both of them will end on 31st December and give you the chance of win Corsair status, Invites and a lot of gold.

Great giveaways again: I apply for Norbits. REP added. Thank you!

Everyone at XWT would like to wish you a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year. We have now activated a site-wide free leech until January 1st 2016. Enjoy, and stay safe over the holidays.

2015.12.25 - Free leech during Christmas 圣诞狂欢，开启free leech 24小时！！圣诞快乐！！ ====HDChina管理组==== Merry Christmas to all!! Free leech will last for 24 hours. Ho! Ho! Ho! ====HDChina Staff====

Free leech for everyone for Christmas! Also anyone who DONATES for Elite Status will receive 50% additional upload added to their reported stats during the free leech period. Everyone else will receive a 25% bonus. Free leech and bonus upload will end sometime on the 26th.

Christmas Freeleech An impromptu site-wide freeleech is now in effect. It is Christmas after all Freeleech ends January 4th. Have fun! ____________________ We have 100's of FREE torrents (all the time). We have karma and we run a fair system. So don't cheat! Once banned, where you gonna get your classic movies from?

TRACKER NAME: Greek Pirate.com TRACKER GENRE: General SIGNUP LINK: http://greekpirate.com/?p=signup&pid=16&agree_terms_of_service_and_rules=yes CLOSING TIME: Soon ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Greek Pirate.com is a greek private torrent tracker for general releases

Staff-ul FileList vă doreşte sărbători fericite şi vă mulţumeşte pentru încă un an în care aţi fost alături de noi! Ca la fiecare ocazie specială, concursurile sunt prezente. Căutam brazi, crăciuniţe şi colinde faine! Mai multe detalii găsiţi aici. Puteţi lăsa urările voastre pentru staff şi restul comunităţii în topicul de mai jos. La mulţi ani! Forum topic: Sărbători fericite! TRANSLATE: FileList staff wishes you happy holidays and thank you for another year you were with us! As every special occasion competitions are present. I was looking trees, Christmas carols drift! More details are available here. You can leave your wishes for the staff and the wider topic below. Happy Birthday! Forum topic: Happy Holidays!

Various Hollywood movie studios are doing everything they can to contain the fallout from the ongoing leak of awards screeners. In order to contain the leaks, the film companies are sending out thousands of takedown requests to various web services, including torrent sites and Google. Last weekend several high quality screener copies started to leak online. More than a dozen screeners have leaked thus far, including titles such as The Hateful Eight, The Revenant, Creed, Concussion and Steve Jobs. And according to one release ‘group’ many more are coming. For Hollywood the prospect of so many quality leaks just before Christmas is a disaster, especially since several of the movies have yet to premiere in theaters. The FBI is trying to catch the source of the leaks and has already traced The Hateful Eight screener back to a Hollywood executive. In the meantime, several Hollywood studios have gone into damage control mode. To limit the availability of the movies various studios have instructed several piracy monitoring companies to locate copies online and target them with takedown requests. In just one day, Google alone received thousands of takedown requests. This week The Weinstein Company sent Google its first batch of DMCA notices in nearly a year, asking the search engine to remove 1,067 links across 189 different domains. File-hosting services Rapidgator and Uploaded were the top targets, with more than 100 links each. Entertainment Film Distributors is also protecting its stake in The Hateful Eight, with varying success. While Google removed many links, it took no action against a Reddit thread which discussed the latest leaks. Rightly so, as the topic doesn’t appear to link to any infringing material. Infringing Reddit thread? The Hateful Eight is not the only leak that has triggered a lot of takedown notices. Several copyright holders are sending a lot of notices for The Revenant, Columbia Pictures is targeting Concussion, while Twentieth Century Fox is doing the same for The Peanuts Movie. NBC Universal is protecting Legend, and so on. In addition to Google, many other online streaming and torrent sites are being contacted directly by the movie studio’s representatives. On some torrent sites copies of the leaked screeners almost completely disappeared at one point, and new uploads continue to be removed. Below is a screenshot of a torrent page for the Legend screener, which KickassTorrents removed after it was notified by a rightsholder. One of the removed torrents at KAT While these takedown notices are not new, the volume appears to be much larger than when regular leaks appear online. This is no surprise, as several of the leaked films are not even in theaters yet, which makes them more likely to be pirated. Unfortunately for the Hollywood studios not all sites are receptive to takedown notices. The Pirate Bay, for example, notoriously ignores such requests and the leaked screeners remain widely available there. So whether the takedown avalanche will actually deter pirates has yet to be seen.

On behalf of all the staff I want to wish all of you a wonderful Xmas and a Happy New Year. Best of wishes to everyone and a big thank you for helping us keeping the site alive with all your support through this year. Hope to see you all in the new year PS: It's cold and sometime it have snow and frost

TRACKER NAME: UHDBits.org TRACKER GENRE: HD SIGNUP LINK: http://uhdbits.org/register.php CLOSING TIME: N/A ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Recommended HD tracker

TRACKER NAME: HDArea.co TRACKER GENRE: HD SIGNUP LINK: http://www.hdarea.co/signup.php?sitelanguage=6 CLOSING TIME: N/A ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: HDArea has become one of the HD trackers that releases first a full bluray or a 720p/1080p encode. Its in top 3 at releasing burays after HDAccess and M-Team.Some of the CHD and HDW encoders / staff joined M-Team and HDArea since these 2 chinese trackers started releasing fast and good bluray hd encodes/movies.It doesnt have a lot of Content but they are fast at releasing Blurays.

Tracker is offline and they post news that tracker will not come back. Really sad.

We've set everyone's Freeleech Token total to 25! We will expire these tokens on Sunday January 10th, at 23:59:59 site time. We never got around to expiring the last round of tokens because of the tracker downtime interrupting the event. If the downtime caused your freeleech tokens to expire before the download completed, and this significantly affected your ratio, please send us a Staff PM and we will try to take care of it. newman has also added a snowy effect to the site. You can disable it with the new 'Enable/Disable Snow' button at the bottom of the page. Happy holidays and have a great new year! Thank you all for making this site great.

The biggest eating day is upon us, and the year is soon coming to an end. Personally, I have invited the whole family, and a little sweet poodle to a big feast tomorrow nigh . But then it struck me that you are missing a christmasgift. Therefore I have given F2L throughout the rest of the year. So go get all the movies and series you need to get through the christmas days. Im buying All of HD looks forward to all the great experiences we will have together in 2016. Merry Christmas everyone. Regards T-Dawg

TRACKER NAME: ArabicSource.net TRACKER GENRE: Anime SIGNUP LINK: http:// http://arabicsource.net/signup.php?a...es&invitehash= CLOSING TIME: N/A ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: ArabicSource is an ARABIC Private Torrent! Tracker for ANIMATED MOVIES / TV