Massive Warez Scam Architects Run For Cover
Written by enigmax on September 30, 2008Two brothers who made millions from an empire of scam file-sharing sites have had their identities revealed. Matt and Jake Dylewski mis-sold subscriptions to FullReleases.com and dozens of similar sites, misleading customers and motivating them to take action. Most of the sites have been taken offline.
For those first getting interested in file-sharing, it can be a bewildering experience, with a huge array of software clients, sites and jargon to cut through. Make no mistake, it’s easy to take a wrong turn. Instead of ending up on Mininova or The Pirate Bay, novice users find themselves clicking their way to the dark side and ending up on a ’scam’ site.
A ’scam’ file-sharing site can operate in numerous ways, but in the end the aims tend to be the same. They either try to offload malware or, more commonly, try to part the site visitor from his cash by getting him to sign up to access the site with his credit card. Usually, users pay a relatively small amount in the first instance, say $5-$10 per month. However, it’s not unusual for additional charges to start appearing on the victim’s card at a later date. Canceling the agreement with the scammers can be a nightmare.
In return for the money paid, the user usually gains access to a basic meta-search site, which simply searches and offers results from completely free sites such as Mininova or The Pirate Bay. Millions of unsuspecting people are signing up for these scam sites (often advertised by ‘legitimate’ BitTorrent sites), and have done for some years now.
One of the most famous scam sites is FullReleases.com, which has been in operation for a few years now and has generated a fortune for its owners and a whole lot of misery for its ‘customers’. Today, those victims have reason to celebrate since the owners of the site have had their identities revealed and, related or not, most of the sites they operated are parked and not longer operational.
M. Dylewski and J. Dylewski are reportedly the sons of Polish immigrants who settled in Surrey, BC, Canada. After their successes running a pair of warez sites, in 2005 they created FullReleases.com and set about making their millions with false claims and misleading operations which targeted naive entrants to the file-sharing phenomenon. The site went on to become one of the world’s most famous scam sites, parting untold people from their cash and prompting thousands of complaints.
However, rumor has that the brothers didn’t stop with one site, and started to build an empire. Dozens more appeared, with some deliberately named to trade on the successes of established genuine sites, with domains such as adultreactor, bitdig, releases.ws and rapidsharereactor.
Right now, many of these sites have been taken down, including FullReleases.com, and although this in itself won’t get refunds for those that have been scammed already, it will certainly give them a boost. It is not 100% sure why all the scam sites are suddenly parked or offline, but it is likely that the brothers are enjoying an early retirement.
So how can people avoid getting sucked in by these scammers and others like them? It’s amazingly simple – NEVER pay to download torrents since they are always available for free, and for God’s sake, Google!
Previously: The Pirate Bay Clashes with Book Publishers
Next: Top 10 Most Pirated TV Shows on BitTorrent
72 Responses
Hunt them down :D
Good, but why put their GF’s on there? So unnecessary.
Sad, but most of the victims could have easily avoided the losses by Googling first.
Sadly there will always be people out there looking to take advantage of the weak.
JIff
http://www.privacy.es.tc
you’ve gotta be pretty stupid to fall for that though…
canada had something to do with this whole fiasco
To be honest, if you are stupid enough to fall for it, you deserve to be scammed… The two brothers found the golden ticket to the easy rich live … I would trade places instantly.
^6, yeah, until you get caught, but seriously, google searching is so much easier,.
omg rape em and eat there costumes!!
Fuck, they’re down the road from me. FullReleases is teh ghey. Even my dog groans when they come up as a search result…. Thank God for small wonders. Surrey is the place stand-up comics use in their routines when they come to Vancouver. They’ll ask the club promoter “What’s the shithole suburb everyone makes fun of around here?” Yeah, that’s Surrey, BC, Canada…
F**k, they’re down the road from me. FullReleases is teh ghey. Even my dog groans when they come up as a search result…. Thank God for small wonders. Surrey is the place stand-up comics use in their routines when they come to Vancouver. They’ll ask the club promoter “What’s the sh*thole suburb everyone makes fun of around here?” Yeah, that’s Surrey, BC, Canada…
“there”?
“their”?
“THEIR”!
(there, their, they’re; take your pick)
Tards… *shrug*
I almost fell for them when I was just starting out. The fact is, unless you’re led to the community through a friend or are naturally smart about the process, it’s hard to know where to turn. I remember when I first started I googled lots of things and those sites repeatedly showed up looking legitimate.
I think it all comes down to laziness and fear:
1. Too lazy to fire up a search engine and do some basic searches and reading… the “dont have time” excuse comes up a lot here
or
2. Fear/intimidated… by the number of search results so when someone offers to take your money, you expect a service… after all, you are paying them right?
while I sympathize with point 2 people, point 1 people are getting pretty much what they deserve.
Just take a little time and read up on things people, dont expect everything to be handed to you on a silver damn plate.
Ryan
http://www.eZee.se
http://fileclub.info/
pictures of them
how about their processing partner who doesn’t refund charges?
http://billingware.net
They both deserve to be shot point blank.
These type of sites can come up at the top of search results like Google.
It may seem completely idiotic to the basic p2p fellow, but these type of sites weren’t so in your face for newcomers in the past.
How many of you can honestly say that you haven’t snagged a virus learning your way around?
I knew the guys.. they were pricks and idiots, but none-the-less VERY rich.
Just before all this happened his msn said he was moving and he never had time to speak.
And just to add – these guys still own (i THINK) a huge porn network which is unrelated to the warez/download sites they owned.
(Comment back to this message if you want to know any more about them..)
Wonderful that they got taken down, although I don’t know why anyone would want to pay for such a thing anyways.
Roze
http://www.28chan.org/apstdt/
I especially like the RlsBlog.COM. Ha!
Sorry to post again so fast but just thought this was funny. I went to ReleaseBlog.Com and clicked on a download and guess where I was redirected? UseNeXt! It’s not surprising that those scumbags are and the UseNeXt scumbags are partners. Wow.
@ all the people who are talking about google, sites like this had addwords accounts, so they got top placements for the type of keywords that newbes would type in.
And what kinda tw** runs a warez site and then starts something like this?
Its a fool who parts with their credit card number over the internet.
Having said that get the tar and feathers ready for the Dylewski Brothers
More power to the guys.If people are dumb enough to pay for something that is Illegal because it’s being traded for “FREE”. they deserve to have their hard earned money taken from them.
I hope the two brothers have a great Life living off ignorant peoples paychecks. I just wish i would have done it!!!!!!!!!!! :p
Well Im not too proud of it, but in fact I was one of them who got tricked by their site.. :-( At the 1st place you DONT get what they promise when you have paid. As pointed in this article most of the links were free… And i thought I paid only a 1 time fee…I didnt realised I got tricked until suddently I got a mail from an unknown billing company noticing me they had taken 20$ from my account… they tooke more, but i didnt realised it until I checked my account… a little bit more every month in fact! Yes shame on me.. :-( I tryed to write to that billing company, without succes. At the end i had to get a new credit card. (and then I got an answer, telling me all my accounts had been deleted! lol)Talking about Google: I did some research and their site looked ok at that time… I have only one thing left to say: May they burn SLOWLY in Hell…
“NEVER pay to download torrents” — I think these 2 guys were el stupido when they could have run this scam for the RIAA and MPAA and made out like bandits — they could have called scamming a “business model”, leaked some e-mails to the scene, and sat back and cashed the checks. Then when it ended, go legit and rename their company to something else and sell viral advertising services.
They also run ewnet.com, a warez forum that has been around for a long ass time allowing users to share via ftp and other methods. I “donated” to become a primary member years ago, and was banned shortly after. I had many a talk with Matt, the guy is a dick.
Everyone at the forum knew he ran various scam download sites, and it was only a matter of time before he was “caught”. Many (myself included) wanted to turn him in to the local authorities for the piracy acts just to stop the piracy acts that benefited nobody or nothing except for their pocketbooks.
Sorry they moved it to ewnet.org a few months (years?) ago, and of course it was formerly easywarez.com.
@11
So agreed…
I think these guys are scumbags, I sure do. But Forrent Freak needs to sit back and take a HARD LOOK at what they have done by just linking such a website that tells you EVERYTHING you could possibly want to know about these 2 clowns. Everyone here thinks filesharing is ok and there shouldn’t be a punishment. But what TF is doing by posting a link to that information is borderline capital punishment. You are in fact encouraging people to seek out and harrass these two, stalk them and hound them or worse… Why else would you want to post that much information? If it was to embarrass them you would have stopped at their pictures, birthdates and just the city they lived in. You went too far imo. But I wont lose sleep over it.
I have written a script to trap warez criminals.
#27
Actually they have had little or no running in that site for quite a while now, and not EVERYONE knew what they were up to, in fact the majority of members are all as shocked as everyone else.
We all knew what Matt was up to. That’s why we (the forum) never supported his endeavors. In fact, most of us loudly expressed we didn’t want his crap on the forums.
Ray aka RaydBomb, you were banned and it wasn’t shortly after you paid to become a sponsor.
I always had a bad feeling about Matt. The guy is a money grubbing douche bag. And I’m glad I can now say it with out being called out by all his bum buddies.
@29
You don’t make sense. fileclub.info is on another website.
to be brutally honest, I wish I had of thought of it first.
Most of did not know what he was up to. We only knew about 1 or two sites which were actually genuinely good and functional without the crap.
- They should be shot point blank?
Come now. At the end of the day pirating is illegal and allthough I may be a pirate I actually think the peeps who got ripped of deserved it. The two brothers were simply ripping of potential pirates hardly the worst crime in the book.
@32
Actually that’s not entirely accurate. But the point is moot.
@36
Deserve what? I don’t see how you could call file-sharing or downloading anything “deserving” of being scammed.
I remember seeing this site when doing Google searches, and after the first time I always got mad when it came up, because you had to pay. I never knew it was a scam site, but I knew that I sure as heck wasn’t going to pay a site for warez. When I first saw it though I thought it was a legitimate site selling actual games lol. XD
Glad they finally got caught.
@25 — Heh, yeah. I’m sure the RIAA would have liked that lol. And they wouldn’t have got into any trouble.
A great read as always :)
“for God’s sake, Google”
That’s exactly how a lot of people find these scam sites to begin with. (as most people online these days don’t know tghe first thing about how to research)
Until Google raised its fees on keywords recently, virtually every word that’s P2P related would return a list of scam sites in the paid results. Adsense was even worse, P2P sites that used it were always advertising scams.
There are many people who will always be suckers, and no amount of advice will ever change this.
Where do I pick up my torch? You can’t have an angry mob without torches :)
J.
Not liking the reference to “Dark Side”
Thar’s gonna be a linchin’
I hate those fullreleases ads on regular torrent sites, it’s just wrong.
Many internet newbs get scamed because of it…
if people are crazy enough to fall for this they deserve to be parted from their cash. No one was there to hand hold us and we managed to cope.
1. Publish home address
2. Publish Girl Friends, Mother, Father, Cousin, Employer’s phone nr
3. FUCK with their bank, address, drivers record and criminal record
4. Moral Profit
If we just work on it, we can destroy their lives! Like they deserve!
PRICELESS how much I understand why they needed money. Hookers and tanning beds..
Fuck, look at them http://fileclub.info/
What a couple of douchefags!
also: Prison Rape, not worth the money. Stupid people, they always get what they deserve.
International money laundering = Some one’s bitch in jail!
viva la Canada
Damn these guys/brothers need RIAA/MPAA as Lawyers and maybe run a shit shop or something.
Just F’ing
TC
Ouch…I was one of those people who got scammed. I wanted to download a Spanish language program similar to the Rosetta Stone. When I Googled, I realize that the FullRelease.com was the only one that had the file. So I promptly paid the discount trial membership and tried to download…. Alas…the file I wanted to download mysteriously disappeared from their website. So I canceled my membership but didn’t know I also had to contact the third party billing company. FullRelease didn’t acknowledge my cancellation right away…I guess it was about 10 days after I canceled my membership. In the meantime, this Italian billing company withdrew a full membership fee when in fact I was not responsible for it. I contacted the billing company but their voice mail was completely full. I contacted my bank about the unauthorized withdraw…but they can’t get a hold of the billing company or the Fullrelease. Finally after many many tries, I was able to talk to the billing company and get my refund. But it was a total pain.
Agree.
List their addresses, email accounts and phone numbers!!
lol if they lived in Russia, they would be dead by now.
The billing company they used is supposedly ran out of Ukraine. Does anyone have any information on this?
Somehow I doubt you can just “randomly” charge people’s credit cards – to me that sounds like a Mafia play and these guys just don’t look bright enough…
The trouble is the community is so full of it’s self that a simple request from a newbie is to flame back with obscene comments etc, so the newbies keep their heads down to avoid the flak and make bad decisions.
To get anywhere in the community you have to do a lot of hard work, searching,googling and most of all know someone who has already done it.
To prove the point, name the best torrent sites for people to go to and I bet there is at least one negative comment which proves the point I am making.
Dude they look like those stupid Gotti wanks.
Looks like they put up some sort of statement:
http://www.fullreleases.com
@1 – Working on it. ;)
For those asking for personal details like addresses, etc. you need to read the comments before posting.
But here’s the link again for you….
http://fileclub.info/
hahah,
the links off their site look like more bs!!
This is not correct, TorrentfFreak.
Just because some guys lost a few bucks, you link to a site with all their personal information on it.
Frankly, it’s not like they murdered or tortured someone.
i always suspected it was a scam. the fact that it always came up with an exact result for what ever i was looking for then it told me i had to login to get the stuff made me suspicious…
@18:
What’s the URL(s) to their porn network ?
WOW I had these guys on my ICQ years ago and they are (or were) actually stand-up guys at the time. Yes they were in a shady business overall but if it makes them money why not do it.
I had a chance to talk to one of their other partners/associates and basically this is what he says happened in cliffnotes: They ran a few porn and download membership sites, using clickbank (there are still many out there using clickbank operated by other people) and decided to change to a billing company from ukraine (wtf were you thinking). The billing guys then started charging users even after they called to cancel etc, and/or not letting them cancel overall. FYI the billing is not owned by the same people as the fileclub.info website says.
Anyways he says they are 99.99% certain Katz (a competitor) was the one that published the original fileclub.info website with the pics etc because their entire network (katz.to/.cd, warez-bb.org, pornbb.org etc) dropped HEAVY in traffic and that they were scared of the new software that was being released by Fullreleases.com and the rest of the network.
I will post more if I get any more information on this.
EWNET was good though, people were generally very helpful not just with downloads but with techy stuff as well, ah well shame they were greedy.
#66:
If you believe that katz made it, you are a seriously dumb person.
“their entire network (katz.to/.cd, warez-bb.org, pornbb.org etc)”
Katz do not own WBB you idiot.
They dont even own PornBB, a member of their staff does.
Seriously you dumb shit gtfo, matt and jake are faggots who deserve to die.
FIND OUT WHERE THEY LIVE AND BREAK THEIR LEGS
Whoever put that site up (fileclub.info) is a fucken loser and putting up pics of girlfriends and all other info is a personal attack and not news. Whoever believes this crap must have an iq of like 50.
Polish emigrees living in North America? Relatives of Flippy from Torrentz.com, I wouldn’t wonder
Not all the pay sites are scammers, to be fair, some simply sell access to the means to download for a one off charge, hold the hands of the noobs who wouldn’t have a clue otherwise and give them plenty of support. $20 or so isn’t necessarily a high one-off cost to pay for the help it takes to get a noob into P2P.
Good article though
PHUC*ING JEWS>>>>>>
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