People all over the world have downloaded pirate copies of the latest leaked episodes of Game of Thrones. 4 episodes leaked online ahead of their official release and appeared to have been ripped from review DVDs. Of course, they quickly became the most pirated files online – each of the episodes has been downloaded over a million times from public torrent sites alone.

The episode 1 was the most popular, accounting for about 135,000 users sharing it and more than a million pirate copies made. As for the countries breakdown, the United Kingdom surprisingly led the way – 1/10 of all IP addresses sharing the series originated from Britain. About 9% came from the United States, 8% from India, 5% from Canada and 4% from France. The Netherlands, Brazil, Greece, Australia, and the Philippines were also actively pirating the show.

It should be noted that the first episode of the HBO show was simulcast in 170 countries, except for UK – the company that broadcasted the show decided to air it at a later date. Now do you have any more questions of why the UK was so actively pirating? Right. No show in time – no money. In the meantime, HBO is investigating the leak, but understands that it originated from within a group approved by HBO.

It should also be noted that a spike in downloads of the previous season of Games of Thrones was also observed a few days before the release of new series: fans all over the world have downloaded them more than 100,000 times a day. In this statistics, the UK was also quite active: Britain ranked 5th in pirating countries. It is not a secret that Game of Thrones was already the most-popular TV series on all file-sharing services, including BitTorrent.