TorrentSpam: Report Fake and Malware Ridden Torrents
The popularity of BitTorrent also has its downsides. Over the past months we reported about fake torrents, torrents that force you to download malware, and torrents that spy on your download behavior. TorrentSpam is a new service that allows you to report such scams, and clean up BitTorrent sites, bit by bit.
Unfortunately there still is a lot of torrent spam on most BitTorrent sites. Some torrents are uploaded by anti-piracy outfits that try to trace your IP. Others are from people that force you to download some shady video player to play the file you just downloaded. This video player (e.g. 3wPlayer) is of course filled with malware that infects your computer.
A good way to check whether a torrent is legit or not is by looking at the comments. If people found the torrent to be fake, it will probably reported there. But up until now there was no central database for checking fake and spam torrents – TorrentSpam is trying to fill this gap. A search for the torrent name on TorrentSpam will return a list of torrents, and the score each torrent has indicates how likely it is that this torrent is actually SPAM.
Some administrators of BitTorrent sites (not all of them) already spend hours every day removing and blocking these fake or malware ridden torrents, but it is nearly impossible to have a 100% clean site at all times.
TorrentSpam will be really useful if admins of BitTorrent sites have access to their database, something that will happen in the near future. The site is currently working on an API section so all torrent sites can utilize TorrentSpam. In the meantime they obviously need you to fill (and check) the database.
Or as the admin of TorrentSpam puts it: “The more reported torrents the better the P2P experience! By letting people know of invalid torrents, the less data will be jamming the networks.”
