For many years, video-focused Internet piracy was all about obtaining pre-recorded content such as movies and TV shows. Now, however, the rise of streaming is enabling a massive uptake of live ‘pirate’ programming.

At the forefront of this movement are web streaming portals, dedicated Kodi add-ons, and premium IPTV services. The latter, which can rival official services, tend to offer a better quality service but with a price tag attached. This has resulted in a whole new market for people seeking to generate revenue from piracy.

One of those outfits was UK-based BulkyIPTV, but as first reported here on TF, last week the entire operation was shut down after police arrested its operator.

“Hi all. Today I was arrested. Everything has been shut down,” its operator confirmed Wednesday.

“They took everything – phone, laptop, PC and cash, as well as other stuff to gather evidence against me. I’m sorry it has come to this but i’m looking at a stretch inside.”

Soon after the news was made public, many people on Facebook speculated that the arrest never happened and that BulkyIPTV’s operator had conjured up a story in order to “do a runner” with his customers’ subscription money.

However, a source close to the situation insisted that an arrest had been made in the Derby area of the UK in connection with live TV piracy, a fact we reported in our article.

For a few days things went silent, but in a joint statement with the Federation Against Copyright Theft, Derbyshire Police have now confirmed that they executed a warrant at a Derby property last week.

“The warrant took place on Tuesday (18th July) as part of ongoing work to stop the use of the illegal set top boxes, which are tampered with to enable them to offer a range of premium subscription services such as Sky TV and BT Sport without paying for them,” the police statement reads.

While the police don’t specifically mention BulkyIPTV in their press release, everything points to the operator of the service being the person who was targeted last week.

BulkyGifts.co.uk, a site connected to BulkyIPTV that sold a product which enabled people to access cable and satellite programming cheaply, was initially registered to the address that police targeted on Tuesday in Grenfell Avenue, Sunny Hill. The name of the person who registered the domain is also a perfect match with Electoral Roll records and social media profiles across numerous sites.

Police confirmed that a 29-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of fraud, money laundering, and copyright offenses. Electronic equipment was seized along with a “large amount” of cash.

In a statement, Kieron Sharp, CEO of the Federation Against Copyright Theft, reminded sellers and buyers of these services that their actions are illegal.

“This collaboration between Derbyshire police and FACT is another step forward in disrupting the sale of illegal streaming devices,” Sharp said.

“People may think there is nothing wrong with having one of these devices and streaming premium pay-for channels for free, such as live sports. However, this is illegal and you would be breaking the law.”

As highlighted in our opinion piece last week, some service providers appear to be playing fast and loose with their security. If that trend continues, expect FACT and the police to keep taking these services down.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

The Mummy is the most downloaded movie for the second week in a row.

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	(1)	The Mummy 2017 (Subbed HDRip)	5.8 / trailer
2	(2)	Ghost In the Shell	6.8 / trailer
3	(…)	Going In Style	6.8 / trailer
4	(3)	The Boss Baby	6.5 / trailer
5	(…)	Spider-Man: Homecoming (HDTS)	8.0 / trailer
6	(5)	Despicable Me 3 (HDTS)	6.7 / trailer
7	(6)	Wonder Woman (Subbed HDrip)	8.2 / trailer
8	(…)	S.W.A.T.: Under Siege	?.? / trailer
9	(4)	Alien Covenant (Subbed HDrip)	6.7 / trailer
10	(7)	Kong: Skull Island	6.9 / trailer

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

In recent years many pirates have moved from more traditional download sites and tools, to streaming portals.

These streaming sites come in all shapes and sizes, and there is fierce competition among site owners to grab the most traffic. More traffic means more money, after all.

While building a streaming from scratch is quite an operation, there are scripts on the market that allow virtually anyone to set up their own streaming index in just a few minutes.

TVStreamCMS is one of the leading players in this area. To find out more we spoke to one of the people behind the project, who prefers to stay anonymous, but for the sake of this article, we’ll call him Rick.

“The idea came up when I wanted to make my own streaming site. I saw that they make a lot of money, and many people had them,” Rick tells us.

After discovering that there were already a few streaming site scripts available, Rick saw an opportunity. None of the popular scripts at the time offered automatic updates with freshly pirated content, a gap that was waiting to be filled.

“I found out that TVStreamScript and others on ThemeForest like MTDB were available, but these were not automatized. Instead, they were kinda generic and hard to update. We wanted to make our own site, but as we made it, we also thought about reselling it.”

Soon after TVStreamCMS was born. In addition to using it for his own project, Rick also decided to offer it to others who wanted to run their own streaming portal, for a monthly subscription fee.

TVStreamCMS website

According to Rick, the script’s automated content management system has been its key selling point. The buyers don’t have to update or change much themselves, as pretty much everything is automatized.

This has generated hundreds of sales over the years, according to the developer. And several of the sites that run on the script are successfully “stealing” traffic from the original, such as gomovies.co, which ranks well above the real GoMovies in Google’s search results.

“Currently, a lot of the sites competing against the top level streaming sites are using our script. This includes 123movies.co, gomovies.co and putlockers.tv, keywords like yesmovies fmovies gomovies 123movies, even in different Languages like Portuguese, French and Italian,” Rick says.

The pirated videos that appear on these sites come from a database maintained by the TVStreamCMS team. These are hosted on their own servers, but also by third parties such as Google and Openload.

When we looked at one of the sites we noticed a few dead links, but according to Rick, these are regularly replaced.

“Dead links are maintained by our team, DMCA removals are re-uploaded, and so on. This allows users not to worry about re-uploading or adding content daily and weekly as movies and episodes release,” Rick explains.

While this all sounds fine and dandy for prospective pirates, there are some significant drawbacks.

Aside from the obvious legal risks that come with operating one of these sites, there is also a financial hurdle. The full package costs $399 plus a monthly fee of $99, and the basic option is $399 and $49 per month.

TVStreamCMS subscription plans

There are apparently plenty of site owners who don’t mind paying this kind of money. That said, not everyone is happy with the script. TorrentFreak spoke to a source at one of the larger streaming sites, who believes that these clones are misleading their users.

TVStreamCMS is not impressed by the criticism. They know very well what they are doing. Their users asked for these clone templates, and they are delivering them, so both sides can make more money.

“We’re are in the business to make money and grow the sales,” Rick says.

“So we have made templates looking like 123movies, Yesmovies, Fmovies and Putlocker to accommodate the demands of the buyers. A similar design gets buyers traffic and is very, very effective for new sites, as users who come from Google they think it is the real website.”

The fact that 123Movies changed its name to GoMovies and recently changed to a GoStream.is URL, only makes it easier for clones to get traffic, according to the developer.

“This provides us with a lot of business because every time they change their name the buyers come back and want another site with the new name. GoMovies, for instance, and now Gostream,” Rick notes.

Of course, the infringing nature of the clone sites means that there are many copyright holders who would rather see the script and its associated sites gone. Previously, the Hollywood group FACT managed to shut down TVstreamScript, taking down hundreds of sites that relied on it, and it’s likely that TVStreamCMS is being watched too.

For now, however, more and more clones continue to flood the web with pirated streams.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Formerly known as XBMC, the popularity of the entirely legal Kodi media player has soared in recent years.

Controversial third-party addons that provide access to infringing content have thrust Kodi into the mainstream and the product is now a household name.

Until recently, TVAddons.ag was the leading repository for these addons. During March, the platform had 40 million unique users connected to the site’s servers, together transferring an astounding petabyte of addons and updates.

Everything was going well until news broke last month that the people behind TVAddons were being sued in a federal court in Texas. Shortly after the site went dark and hasn’t been back since.

This was initially a nuisance to the millions of Kodi devices that relied on TVAddons for their addons and updates. With the site gone, none were forthcoming. However, the scene recovered relatively quickly and for users who know what they’re doing, addons are now available from elsewhere.

That being said, something very unusual happened this week. Out of the blue, several key TVAddons domains were transferred to a Canadian law firm. TVAddons, who have effectively disappeared, made no comment. The lawyer involved, Daniel Drapeau, ignored requests for an explanation.

While that’s unusual enough, there’s a bigger issue at play here for millions of former TVAddons users who haven’t yet wiped their devices or upgraded them to work with other repositories.

Without going into huge technical detail, any user of an augmented Kodi device that relied on TVAddons domains (TVAddons.ag, Offshoregit.com) for updates can be reasonably confident that the domains their device is now accessing are not controlled by TVAddons anymore. That is not good news.

When a user installs a Kodi addon or obtains an update, the whole system is based on human trust. People are told about a trustworthy source (repository or ‘repo’) and they feel happy getting their addons and updates from it.

However, any person in control of a repo can make a Kodi addon available that can do pretty much anything. When that’s getting free movies, people tend to be happy, but when that’s making a botnet out of set-top boxes, enthusiasm tends to wane a bit.

If the penny hasn’t yet dropped, consider this.

TVAddons’ domains are now being run by a law firm which refuses to answer questions but has the power to do whatever it likes with them, within the law of course. Currently, the domains are lying dormant and aren’t doing anything nefarious, but if that position changes, millions of people will have absolutely no idea anything is wrong.

TorrentFreak spoke to Kodi Project Manager Nathan Betzen who agrees that the current security situation probably isn’t what former TVAddons users had in mind.

“These are unsandboxed Python addons. The person [in control of] the repo could do whatever they wanted. You guys wrote about the addon that created a DDoS event,” Betzen says.

“If some malware author wanted, he could easily install a watcher that reports back the user’s IP address and everything they were doing in Kodi. If the law firm is actually an anti-piracy group, that seems like the likeliest thing I can think of,” he adds.

While nothing can be ruled out, it seems more likely that the law firm in question has taken control of TVAddons’ domains in order to put them out of action, potentially as part of a settlement in the Dish Network lawsuit. However, since it refuses to answer any questions, everything is open to speculation.

Another possibility is that the domains are being held pending sale, which then raises questions over who the buyer might be and what their intentions are. The bottom line is we simply do not know and since nobody is talking, it might be prudent to consider the worst case scenario.

“If it’s just a holding group, then people [in control of the domain/repo] could do whatever they can think of. Want a few million incredibly inefficient bit mining boxes?” Betzen speculates.

While this scenario is certainly a possibility, one would at least like to think of it as unlikely. That being said, plenty of Internet security fails can be attributed to people simply hoping for the best when things go bad. That rarely works.

On the plus side, Betzen says that since Python code is usually pretty easy to read, any nefarious action could be spotted by vigilant members of the community fairly quickly. However, Martijn Kaijser from Team Kodi warns that it’s possible to ship precompiled Python code instead of the readable versions.

“You can’t even see what’s in the Python files and what they do,” he notes.

Finally, there’s a possibility that TVAddons may be considering some kind of comeback. Earlier this week a new domain – TVAddons.co – was freshly registered, just after the old domains shifted to the law firm. At this stage, however, nothing is known about the site’s plans.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Two weeks ago we noticed a ‘handy’ feature where Google highlighted various torrent sites in its search results.

People who typed “best torrent sites” into the search box would see a reel of popular sites such as The Pirate Bay and RARBG in the results, featured with their official logos and all.

Google employees obviously didn’t curate the list themselves. They are a Google feature called the “results carousel,” which is generated based on an algorithm. Still, considering the constant criticism the search engine faces from rightsholders, it’s a sensitive topic.

The torrent site carousel

It appears that the search engine itself wasn’t very happy with the featured search results either. This week, the torrent sites were quietly banned from the search carousel feature. According to the company, it wasn’t working as intended.

“We have investigated this particular issue and determined that this results carousel wasn’t working in the intended manner, and we have now fixed the issue,” a Google spokesperson informed TorrentFreak.

Although Google carefully avoids the words copyright and piracy in its comments, it’s quite obvious what motivated this decision. The company doesn’t want to highlight any pirate sites, to avoid yet another copyright controversy.

That the intervention was triggered by “piracy” concerns is backed up by another change. While various “streaming sites” are still prominently listed in a search carousel, the pirate sites were carefully stripped from there as well.

A few days ago it still listed sites including Putlocker, Alluc, and Movie4k.to, but only legitimate streaming portals remain on the list today. That change definitely required some human intervention.

Only ‘legitimate’ streaming postals now

This isn’t the first time that Google’s “rich” search results have featured pirate sites. The same thing happened in the past when the search engine displayed pirate site ratings of movies, next to ratings from regular review sites such as IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes.

Apparently, Google’s search engine algorithms need some anti-piracy fine-tuning, every now and then.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.