After being closed down by the police of Ukraine, Demonoid (one of the largest BitTorrent trackers in the world) is not yet off the hook, with the people heading the service now being under criminal investigation and prosecution in Mexico.




A few days ago Ukraine confirmed that Demonoid wasn’t just subject to DDoS attacks – the website has also been raided by the police. A week ago the government authorities came to ColoCall (the Toller) – the firm hosting Demonoid – in order to close the service down. The representatives of the company confirmed in the interview to the local media that investigators have copied all the data from the Demonoid servers and sealed them. Apparently, Ukraine had promised the US that it would do its best to improve its efforts towards enforcing copyright and so presented Demonoid on a platter. An anonymous source in the Ukraine’s Interior Ministry confirmed that this action was scheduled to coincide with Deputy Prime Minister’s trip to the US.

Peter Vlasenko, Commercial Director at ColoCall, claimed that his company did warn Demonoid a few times about the complaints filed against the BitTorrent tracker. In addition, Vlasenko warned that this could force the website’s Internet service provider to cut any relations with it, which actually took place last week.

Sergei Burlakov, the spokesperson for the Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, explained that the Division of Economic Crimes has got an international request from Interpol to send a request to the hosting company. After sending this request to ColoCall, the broadband provider decided to stop working with the BitTorrent tracker.

In the meantime, a criminal investigation was started against the operators of the tracker: Burlakov revealed that Mexico had initiated a criminal case against the Demonoid operators. The BitTorrent tracker is being charged with intellectual property rights infringement.

Last year, Mexican authorities raided Monterrey, the capital of the north-eastern Mexican state of Nuevo León, in order to apprehend one of the operators of the notorious P2P service. In result of that raid, access to Demonoid in Mexico was completely shut down.

At the moment the spokespeople can’t say whether the investigation is being carried out against the same person who was arrested last year in Mexico or a different one.

I was surprised that Ukraine complied with the US on this one