INTRO: For anyone who’s been involved in the piracy
community, KickassTorrents or KAT, is one of the most classic torrenting sites in the
world right up there with The Pirate Bay.
In fact, in 2015, KAT became the most popular file-sharing website in the world as The Pirate
Bay suffered from legal consequences.
Unfortunately for KAT, their time at the top didn’t last too long as they started to
experience their own legal issues soon after.
Nevertheless, KAT has remained an extremely popular option amongst pirates, allowing them
to easily secure their spot in the hall of infamy.
But as we saw with the Pirate Bay’s founders and MegaUpload’s founder, prosecutors and
copyright holders aren’t exactly kind to such founders.
After all, New Zealand sent their anti-terrorist squad against MegaUpload’s founder, and
Sweden chased the Pirate Bay founders across the world.
So, there’s no doubt that if you found one of these sites, you wanna remain anonymous,
and that’s exactly what KAT’s founder tried to do.
But, prosecutors did eventually find out who he was, and here’s what happened next.
INCOMPLIANCE: Taking a look back, the story of KickassTorrents
circles back to a man named Artem Vaulin, or at least that’s what prosecutors allege.
Ethnically, Artem was Ukrainian, but it looks like he lived out most of his life in Poland.
It’s not clear when exactly Artem was born, but given that he was 30 years old when he
was arrested in 2016, we can deduct that he was born in 1986 or 1987.
Anyway, it looks like Artem was heavily involved in the piracy community during his teenage
years.
And it didn’t take him very long to switch from being a user to being a host as Artem
spotted a business opportunity within the piracy scene.
Similar to YouTube and Instagram, if you hosted a piracy site, you could display ads that
could drive in revenue, and as you’ll see later, for KAT, this added up to quite a bit
of revenue.
Considering the potential, Artem didn’t waste any time and he quickly put his coding
skills to work.
Soon after, in November of 2008, Artem launched KickassTorrents.
Initially, it looks like Artem tried his best to avoid issues with the authorities.
KAT proudly claimed that it complied with the DMCA and that they would remove copyright
infringing torrents as soon as they were notified.
But, in reality, this wasn’t exactly the case.
Given the context of the site, it didn’t take long for users to start uploading copyrighted
content, and for copyright holders to start contacting KAT.
But, they were hit with the same response every single time.
Greetings, your request has been reviewed, but cannot be processed due to one or more
of the following reasons.
And most of these reasons were complete and utter BS.
Reason 4, for example, was that there were more than 30 torrents mentioned in the claim
email.
If KAT was legitimately trying to comply, addressing such a claim would be a top priority.
But, KAT was intentionally avoiding claims with large lists of torrents, probably because
they wanted to draw out the takedown process and minimize how many torrents they lost with
each takedown.
KAT was able to get away with such outright incompliance for many years as prosecutors
had much bigger fish to fry.
But as soon as they took down MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay, prosecutors turned their focus
to KickassTorrents.
ANONYMOUS BATTLE: Initially, prosecutors started off pretty
light against Kickass.
They didn’t know who was behind the site, and honestly, I don’t think they cared.
They just wanted to take down the website and stop the spread of copyrighted material.
So, in February of 2013, they started working with internet service providers to block access
to KAT.
The High Court in London ordered ISPs to block people from accessing KickassTorrents and
two other torrent sites.
The ISPs complied and blocked access, but every time they blocked access to one domain
of Kickass, Kickass just moved to another domain.
They moved from ka.tt to kickass.to to kickass.so to kickasstorrents.im to kat.cr and so on
and so forth.
Clearly, prosecutors couldn’t take down the website through ISPs, but they were able
to force KAT to constantly switch domains.
This meant that most people didn’t know what the latest domain was off the top of
their heads.
They had to Google KickassTorrents to find the latest link.
Considering this, the Motion Picture Association of America or the MPAA decided to work with
Google to take down KAT.
They asked Google to remove the correct kickass link from Google search results.
They also worked with Steam to prevent the correct link from being shared on Steam chat.
This strategy was actually decently effective as this resulted in many pirates stumbling
upon malicious copycat sites that were filled with malware and viruses.
And this was the perfect excuse for Chrome and Firefox to completely block access to
KAT even if you had the correct link.
If you tried to access KAT through these browsers in late 2015, you got a message suggesting
that they blocked access to the site because they didn’t want you to download a virus.
It’s definitely not because they were being pressured by copyright holders, they just
wanted to look out for your best interests.
Jokes aside though, we all know why they blocked access.
In 2016, Chrome and Firefox changed their excuse to phishing concerns, but soon enough,
neither of them wanted to play these charades anymore.
So, they opened up access and stepped out of the way.
By this point, it was clear that KAT wasn’t just a bug that prosecutors could squash and
move on.
KAT had evolved into being the world’s largest file-sharing site, so prosecutors decided
that it was time to go for the host.
IRS SPY: By this point, the FBI had spent years trying
to unsuccessfully takedown KAT, so, they decided to escalate things to the real top dogs: the
IRS.
Whether it be Al Capone or the Wolf of Wall Street, it’s clear that the one entity that
you never wanna piss off is the IRS.
Many have pissed off the FBI and gotten away with it for years, but almost no one has escaped
the IRS, and this was no different for Artem.
The IRS didn’t care that Artem was causing billions of dollars worth of lost revenue
for copyright holders.
But they did care that Artem was causing losses for the IRS.
You see, Artem made money off displaying ads on KAT, and many of these advertisers were
American.
Yet, Artem wasn’t paying sales tax or income tax on this revenue which was a fatal mistake.
In March of 2016, the IRS got an undercover agent to inquire about an ad on KAT.
The IRS agent was able to get in contact with a KAT employee named Mr. White.
Mr. White informed the agent that KAT charges $300 per ad per day and gave the agent payment
details to a Latvian bank.
The agent went ahead and bought a five-day ad in order to gain the trust of KAT and potentially
get more details.
Clearly, the IRS had motives behind paying KAT, but technically, this does also mean
that the IRS supported KAT with $1500.
Anyway, shortly after, the IRS agent contacted Mr. White again to buy a more expensive ad.
This time he was looking at a banner ad that cost $1000 to $3200 per day.
It’s not clear if the IRS actually made the purchase, but they were able to uncover
a new bank account based in Estonia.
Using these details in conjunction with the Mutual Legal Assitance Treaty, investigators
were able to obtain all the banking records of these two accounts.
This helped the IRS figure out that Artem was making bank off of KAT.
At the peak, KAT was pulling in nearly $17 million in annual revenue.
The IRS wanted their cut, and fortunately for them, the bank accounts led to more clues.
Investigators were able to uncover that the operation was being hosted out of Chicago
and that the servers were located in Canada.
But, the most important piece of evidence they found was Artem’s IP address.
They didn’t know who the IP address belonged to, but the walls were quickly closing in
on Artem.
ARRESTED: Artem had no idea that prosecutors were so
close to uncovering his identity, so he continued on with his daily life.
And this included purchasing media from the iTunes store.
Ironically, the owner of the largest piracy website in the world was paying for his own
media.
I guess that he felt that if you had the money, you should pay for it.
I’m not sure, but this ironically ended up being the root of his demise.
You see, investigators were working with a bunch of companies to track down the IP address,
one of which was Apple.
And, when Artem made a purchase on the iTunes store using his Apple ID and his IP address,
prosecutors were quickly able to identify him.
Facebook was also able to provide evidence that it was in fact Artem and the same IP
address that was operating KAT’s official Facebook account.
And on July 20, 2016, the Department of Justice proudly announced that they had uncovered
the identity of Artem and that Poland police had arrested him.
They were also able to shut down KAT’s proxy servers and officially take down the website.
Prosecutors also went ahead and stacked on every copyright infringement and money laundering
charge they could think of.
And these were pretty severe given that KAT had distributed $1 billion worth of media.
According to Artem’s lawyer Ira Rothken, they were looking to charge up to 20 years
for the money laundering and up to 5 years for each count of copyright infringement.
Rothken did clarify that he highly doubted that all these convictions would go through,
but worst-case scenario, Artem could’ve been looking at decades in jail.
To make things worse, Artem was suffering from extreme back pain and had to be taken
to the hospital.
Artem’s describes that during this trip to the hospital, he was escorted by four policemen
with machines guns.
And one of the guards told him that they heard that he committed three murders.
Hearing this, Artem knew that this was going to be more of a criminal lawsuit than a civil
lawsuit, and he had no intention of sticking around for the verdict.
KAT TODAY: As you might’ve already guessed, as soon
as bail was posted, Artem paid the amount and fled the country.
The bail amount was surprisingly only $108,000.
For someone who was making tens of millions per year, forfeiting even ten million would’ve
been an easy price to pay for freedom.
But, luckily for Artem, he only had to pay a little over a hundred thousand.
It’s not clear how exactly Artem left Poland given that his passport was confiscated, but
given his wealth, I’m sure he was easily able to find a 1st class smuggler.
Anyway, on August 26, 2020, the Polish Ministry of Justice confirmed that Artem had fled the
country and that extradition proceedings would no longer be continuing in Poland.
His legal team withdrew from the case after they lost contact with Artem, and the Artem
prosecution has since been put on hold.
In other words, as long as Artem is never caught, the case will never reach a verdict,
and Artem can more or less live a free life in some non-extraditing country.
As for KickassTorrents today, there are many sites trying to emulate the original, but
the consensus seems to be that none of them are as good as the original.
Also, one of the main reasons that Kickass became so popular was because the Pirate Bay
was taken down, so naturally, everyone flocked to the second-best option.
But, with the Pirate Bay basically becoming immortal, there seems to be little need for
anything else.
Still, many miss the glory days of KAT and the community behind it.
While KAT was not able to become immortal like the Pirate Bay, there’s the doubt that
KAT will permanently be remembered as a legend in the piracy community.
Do you guys think it’s moral to pirate?
Comment that down below.
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