Two years ago we revealed how scammers were abusing the DMCA to extract cash payments from innocent Internet subscribers.

They used the name of piracy-tracking firm IP-Echelon and several major copyright holders, including HBO, to demand settlements for allegedly pirated content.

The DMCA scam was pretty convincing. The emails lacked IP-Echelon’s PGP signature but were good enough to fool some Internet providers into forwarding them. If anything, it revealed that these type of notices should be carefully vetted.

While we haven’t seen any reports of these fraudulent notices since, Internet provider Grande Communications has taken an interest in the matter, in preparation for its piracy liability case against the RIAA.

This case relies on DMCA notices sent by IP-Echelon competitor Rightscorp. The ISP is therefore eager to hear out IP-Echelon to find out more about the issue, noting that they received the scam emails as well.

“Grande has also received IP-Echelon infringement notices, which include both authenticated, PGP-signed infringement notices from IP-Echelon, as well as fake, non-PGP-signed notices which falsely claim to be from IP-Echelon,” Grande informed the court late last week.

“In light of this phishing scam involving IP-Echelon and Grande, as well as the similarity of IP-Echelon’s role in investigating and sending infringement notices regarding alleged BitTorrent-based infringements to the role played by Rightscorp for Plaintiffs in this case, Grande decided to subpoena IP-Echelon to produce certain documents and appear for a deposition.”

Grande’s interest in IP-Echelon is understandable. Getting in touch with the company, which has offices in the US and Australia, has proven to be rather complicated though.

The ISP used a private process server to serve the subpoena at IP-Echelon’s Los Angeles office, but these efforts failed more than once. The ISP’s legal team also reached out to the piracy tracking firm via telephone and email, but again, without any success.

This prompted Grande to ask the court for help from some heavy hitters in law enforcement. The ISP would like U.S. Marshals to get involved, so they can use their arsenal to track down and serve IP-Echelon.

“In the absence of proper service of the subpoena on IP-Echelon, Grande would be prejudiced because it would be unable to obtain evidence from IP-Echelon,” the company writes.

“Accordingly, Grande requests the assistance of the U.S. Marshal to complete service on IP-Echelon.”

As far as we know IP-Echelon still works for several Hollywood studios so there must be a way to reach them, especially if the Marshals get involved in locating the piracy tracking company.

Whether evidence and a deposition of IP-Echelon are going to help Grande’s case is unclear, but that’s for another time.

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A copy of Grande Communications’ motion to order the U.S. Marshal for the Central District of California to serve Grande’s Subpoena on IP-Echelon is available here (pdf).

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Earlier this month, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN revealed details of its case against Netherlands-based company Leaper Beheer BV.

BREIN’s complaint, which was filed at the Limburg District Court in Maastricht, claimed that
Leaper sold access to unlicensed live TV streams and on-demand movies. Around 4,000 live channels and 1,000 movies were included in the package, which was distributed to customers in the form of an .M3U playlist.

BREIN said that distribution of the playlist amounted to a communication to the public in contravention of the EU Copyright Directive. In its defense, Leaper argued that it is not a distributor of content itself and did not make anything available that wasn’t already public.

In a detailed ruling the Court sided with BREIN, noting that Leaper communicated works to a new audience that wasn’t taken into account when the content’s owners initially gave permission for their work to be distributed to the public.

The Court ordered Leaper to stop providing access to the unlicensed streams or face penalties of 5,000 euros per IPTV subscription sold, link offered, or days exceeded, to a maximum of one million euros. Further financial penalties were threatened for non-compliance with other aspects of the ruling.

In a fresh announcement Friday, BREIN revealed that three companies and their directors (Leaper included) have signed agreements to cease-and-desist, in order to avert summary proceedings. According to BREIN, the companies are the biggest sellers of pirate IPTV subscriptions in the Netherlands.

In addition to Leaper Beheer BV, Growler BV, DITisTV and their respective directors are bound by a number of conditions in their agreements but primarily to cease-and-desist offering hyperlinks or other technical means to access protected works belonging to BREIN’s affiliates and their members.

Failure to comply with the terms of the agreement will see the companies face penalties of 10,000 euros per infringement or per day (or part thereof).

DITisTV’s former website now appears to sell shoes and a search for the company using Google doesn’t reveal many flattering results. Consumer website Consumentenbond.nl enjoys the top spot with an article reporting that it received 300 complaints about DITisTV.

“The complainants report that after they have paid, they have not received their order, or that they were not given a refund if they sent back a malfunctioning media player. Some consumers have been waiting for their money for several months,” the article reads.

According to the report, DiTisTV pulled the plug on its website last June, probably in response to the European Court of Justice ruling which found that selling piracy-configured media players is illegal.

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This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Deadpool 2 is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(3)	Deadpool 2 (HDTS)	8.3 / trailer
2	(2)	Avengers: Infinity War (HDCam)	9.1 / trailer
3	(4)	Black Panther	7.9 / trailer
4	(1)	Pacific Rim: Uprising	5.8 / trailer
5	(…)	A Quiet Place (Subbed HDRip)	8.0 / trailer
6	(7)	Ready Player One	7.8 / trailer
7	(…)	Death Wish (Subbed HDRip)	6.4 / trailer
8	(8)	12 Strong	6.8 / trailer
9	(…)	Gringo	6.4 / trailer
10	(5)	Red Sparrow	6.7 / trailer

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Launched in 2010, Google’s Chrome Store is the go-to place for people looking to pimp their Chrome browser.

Often referred to as apps and extensions, the programs offered by the platform run in Chrome and can perform a dazzling array of functions, from improving security and privacy, to streaming video or adding magnet links to torrent sites.

Also available on the Chrome Store are themes, which can be installed locally to change the appearance of the Chrome browser.

While there are certainly plenty to choose from, some additions to the store over the past couple of months are not what most people have come to expect from the add-on platform.

Free movies on Chrome’s Web Store?

As the image above suggests, unknown third parties appear to be exploiting the Chrome Store’s ‘theme’ section to offer visitors access to a wide range of pirate movies including Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War and Rampage.

When clicking through to the page offering Ready Player One, for example, users are presented with a theme that apparently allows them to watch the movie online in “Full HD Online 4k.”

Of course, the whole scheme is a dubious scam which eventually leads users to Vioos.co, a platform that tries very hard to give the impression of being a pirate streaming portal but actually provides nothing of use.

Nothing to see here

In fact, as soon as one clicks the play button on movies appearing on Vioos.co, visitors are re-directed to another site called Zumastar which asks people to “create a free account” to “access unlimited downloads & streaming.”

“With over 20 million titles, Zumastar is your number one entertainment resource. Join hundreds of thousands of satisfied members and enjoy the hottest movies,” the site promises.

With this kind of marketing, perhaps we should think about this offer for a second. Done. No thanks.

In extended testing, some visits to Vioos.co resulted in a redirection to EtnaMedia.net, a domain that was immediately blocked by MalwareBytes due to suspected fraud. However, after allowing the browser to make the connection, TF was presented with another apparent subscription site.

We didn’t follow through with a sign-up but further searches revealed upset former customers complaining of money being taken from their credit cards when they didn’t expect that to happen.

Quite how many people have signed up to Zumastar or EtnaMedia via this convoluted route from Google’s Chrome Store isn’t clear but a worrying number appear to have installed the ‘themes’ (if that’s what they are) offered on each ‘pirate movie’ page.

At the time of writing the ‘free Watch Rampage Online Full Movie’ ‘theme’ has 2,196 users, the “Watch Avengers Infinity War Full Movie” variant has 974, the ‘Watch Ready Player One 2018 Full HD’ page has 1,031, and the ‘Watch Black Panther Online Free 123putlocker’ ‘theme’ has more than 1,800. Clearly, a worrying number of people will click and install just about anything.

We haven’t tested the supposed themes to see what they do but it’s a cast-iron guarantee that they don’t offer the movies displayed and there’s always a chance they’ll do something awful. As a rule of thumb, it’s nearly always wise to steer clear of anything with “full movie” in the title, they can rarely be trusted.

Finally, those hoping to get some guidance on quality from the reviews on the Chrome Store will be bitterly disappointed.

Garbage reviews, probably left by the scammers

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Website blocking is without a doubt one of the favorite anti-piracy tools of the entertainment industries.

The UK is a leader on this front after the High Court ordered the largest ISPs to block access to popular file-sharing sites. Over time the number of blocked URLs in the UK has grown to well over 1,000, including many popular torrent, streaming, and direct download sites.

The Pirate Bay is arguably the biggest target of all. Not only is the site itself blocked by major ISPs, many proxy sites and proxy linking sites are blacklisted as well. The goal of these efforts is to prevent people from accessing the notorious torrent site, but that’s easier said than done.

This week, we decided to take a look at the most visited ‘pirate’ sites in the UK. For this quest, we used data from the traffic monitoring company Alexa, which is often cited by copyright holders as well. Despite the blocking efforts, we spotted quite a few pirate sources among the UK’s top sites.

As it stands, Pirateproxy.sh tops the list. This Pirate Bay proxy is the 115th most-visited site in the UK, which is good for an estimated fifteen million visits per month.

Looking at the list of the 500 most-visited sites in the UK, Pirateproxy.sh is just one of the many Pirate Bay oriented sites. The proxy indexer Unblocked.mx is ranked 227th, for example, while Piratebays.be, Proxybay.bz, Unblocked.lat, Piratebayproxylist.net and Proxyof.com all make an appearance as well.

Most surprising, perhaps, is that the regular ThePirateBay.org still gets a decent amount of traffic too, as it’s currently ranked 319th. That’s more popular than in some other countries where there are no ISP restrictions. This traffic comes in part from VPNs.

Pirateproxy.sh

Does this mean that the blockades have no effect at all? No, that’s impossible to conclude based on these observations. What it does show, however, is that there is still plenty of Pirate Bay traffic in the UK, even to the original site.

Pirateproxy.sh, for example, is part of the ‘Unblocked‘ team which operates a series of proxies and proxy indexes. Since 2013, they’ve been actively providing people with workarounds for blocked sites and continuously launch new domains when theirs are added to the blocklists.

The Unblocked operator believes that while some people may be deterred by the ISP blocks, many are not.

“Although the blocks have had the intended effect of blocking popular file-sharing sites, I don’t believe they are effective since users have access to many workarounds to access these sites,” he explains.

“For any given blocked site, there will be countless proxy sites available with new domains constantly being created.”

Unblocked regularly updates its domains after they are added to the blocklist, which is usually once a month. Just a few weeks ago the main proxy index moved from Unblocked.mx to Unblocked.lat, and that’s probably not the last change.

The new domains are accessible for a few weeks, or sometimes months, and if they are blocked, other ones will simply replace them.

This is not limited to The Pirate Bay and its proxies either. Looking more closely at the most-visited sites in the UK we see more ‘pirate’ sites, some of which are supposed to be blocked.

An overview of the ten most-used pirate sites in the UK is presented below. Some of these will likely be added to the ISP blocklists in the near future, if they aren’t already.

However, similar to regular takedown notices and domain seizures, ISPs blockades have also turned into a game of whack-a-mole.

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The label “pirate site” applies to sites that have been classified as such by entertainment industry groups. Unblocked.mx already started redirecting to a new domain name.

Site	Alexa rank	Type	Original site blocked?
torrentfreak.com
Pirateproxy.sh	115	Torrent proxy	No
Openload.co	194	Cyberlocker	Yes
0123movies.com	215	Streaming	Yes
Rutracker.org	222	Torrents	No
Unblocked.mx	227	Proxy links	Yes
Piratebays.be	255	Torrent proxy	No
Kissanime.ru	310	Streaming	No
Thepiratebay.org	319	Torrents	Yes
Solarmoviez.ru	327	Streaming	No
Proxybay.bz	338	Proxy links	No

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