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Demonoid Shut by Ukrainian Authorities

After a prolonged outage that lasted for nearly a week Demonoid has reportedly been audited and closed down by the Ukrainian law enforcement agency.

Kommersant reported that the Ukrainian anti-cybercrime police division carried out an investigation of ColoCall – the hosting service provider for Demonoid. Servers were sealed after all the data on the servers was copied. According to ColoCall the servers haven’t been seized but, they are not operational any more. The hosting service provider is going to end the agreement with Demonoid.

"Investigators have copied all the information from the Demonoid servers and sealed them.” a manager from ColoCall, wishing to stay anonymous, said notes TorrentFreak.

Founded in 2003, the torrent tracker and invitation only site has switched its locations quite a few times. In 2010 RIAA named it as one of the top 10 sites that contained pirated content. Demonoid had a total of 378,000 torrent files as of May.

It is believed that the real motive behind the closure of Demonoid is politically influenced. According to Kommersant, through sources inside the Interior Ministry of Ukraine, the timing of the raid coincides with Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky‘s very first trip to the United States. This move follows a promise made by Ukraine to adopt a firm stance against copyright infringement and piracy.

The Demonoid admin is still at large it seems and ColoCall hasn’t named the owner of the site.

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