The KAT is now behind the bars. Your one-on-one destination to download movies, TV Shows, music is down.
The alleged owner of the popular torrent website KickassTorrents (KAT) has been arrested by U.S. Government. Along with this, a Federal court in Chicago has ordered the seizure of several KAT domain names. So you probably won’t find a copy of KAT in any of the domains.
According to TorrentFreak report, a criminal complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago. The alleged owner (identified as Artem Vaulin, 30, of Kharkiv, Ukraine) of KAT is charged with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement.
“Vaulin is charged with running today’s most visited illegal file-sharing website, responsible for unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials.” said Assistant Attorney General Caldwell on the announcement.
Interestingly the complaint reveals that Apple helped the investigators by providing Vaulin personal details. Investigators have traced an IP-address used for an iTunes transaction, which is the same IP-address that was used to login to KAT’s Facebook account.
A tip – If you are planning to run an illegal online torrent operation, never ever use any online public services, don’t get social on Facebook and buy apps from iTunes.
KAT was one of the most popular sites on the Internet with more than 50 million unique monthly hits. It is the 69th most frequently visited site online beating out even The Pirate Bay.
At the time of writing, it seems most of the KAT domains are down including its TOR domain extension.