Officers from the National Directorate for Combating Organized Crime said they raided a total of three locations in the western city of Pernik, the central northern city of Gabrovo and the capital Sofia. The aim: stop the illegal distribution of music and movies.

Although not directly named in yesterday’s Interior Ministry announcement, the action was targeted at P2PBG and Elit-BG, sites with combined userbases of at least 750,000 members.

P2PBG alone had more than 600K members but the exact userbase of Elit-Bg is unclear since a database issue last year caused them to ‘lose’ 200K members. Nevertheless, their popularity placed them in the country’s top 5 most popular torrent sites.

The authorities say that they have arrested two individuals, allegedly the sites’ owners. According to the Interior Ministry, one of them is “a minor”. TorrentFreak is informed that he is a teenager, just 17-years-old.

While computer equipment and other hardware is said to have been seized, that does not appear to include site hardware. Both sites remain up on the same host located outside the country in Germany. Access to their trackers, however, has been disabled.

A notice on P2PBG declares: “Access to the torrent section is disabled for all users. Please save your angry comments.”

The Interior Ministry described the raids as “another successful operation” in the Ministry of Culture’s overall plan to crack down on copyright infringement.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

As part of the Ministry’s continuing policy of taking down piracy sites, on Saturday it announced that employees of GDBOP, the Computer Crime Department of the country’s organized crime unit, had busted a site that was illegally distributing movies, music and software.

Carried out in conjunction with the police from the southern city of Haskovo and the town of Ivaylovgrad, the raid netted servers which the authorities described as a “huge mall” for copyright infringing material.

While this is the extent of information provided by officials, thanks to TorrentFreak’s Bulgarian sources we can provide quite a bit more.

Not surprisingly, the authorities were prompted into action by the IFPI-affiliated Bulgarian Association of Music Producers (BAMP) who appeared to be working under the impression that they had a very big fish to catch.

With this in mind, on Saturday afternoon and with plenty of man power, the anti-mafia unit carried out their raid.

“Around 3 PM, 15 people form GDBOP entered the office, and as in an American movie, got everyone to lay down,” recalled Atanas Shishmanov, the owner of the company targeted.

Shishmanov owns Elkom 63, a company which offers internet and television services for a small town of around 4,000 people, CCTV systems, computer/cash register repair services and web design.

So what did the mafia unit take with their 15 men and police backup? Two PCs containing 5TB of data in total.

According to Shishmanov the computers aren’t even owned by his company.

“I read the Internet report and laughed,” he said, while noting that the police had no search warrant.

“The bad thing is that those computers were ones left by customers for repair, and they were taken open, as they were. We even don’t know what they had on them.”

Shishmanov is not the only one who’s clueless about the target of the raid. The authorities have left the the public in the dark about the name and identity of this to-be-repaired “piracy mall” that was allegedly operating from two broken PCs.

This action is the latest against alleged online copyright infringement in Bulgaria. Following talks with IFPI, in July authorities started taking action against various torrent and other file-sharing services, including online library Chitanka.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Within days of this announcement Yavor Kolev, the head of Bulgaria’s Computer Crimes Department, stated on national TV that he would begin taking tough action against BitTorrent sites and other file-sharing locations, especially those that profit from their activities.

“We will shut down Zamunda and Arena BG and their servers that supply pirated movies and music and take money from their users via premium SMS,” Kolev told the media. However, neither site takes money from BitTorrent users in this way, instead generating income from advertising. This week it became clear that other sites would be targeted first.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, it has just carried out “the largest ever operation against Internet piracy in Bulgaria”.

Four file-sharing sites were targeted – nanoset.net (which advertised new releases via Twitter), rapidadd.com, 4storing.com and afasta.com. They are accused of distributing music, movies, books and software without the permission of copyright holders and as of today, all four remain down.

After several months of investigations, on a judge’s authorization and under the supervision of the Deputy District Prosecutor, on Thursday authorities moved against the sites. It is being claimed that they were being operated by “an organized crime group” which employed “sophisticated mechanisms for concealing the location of their servers”.

Nevertheless, as can be seen from the photos below and the video here, servers -18 in all containing a claimed 120TB – were found. Computer equipment and documents were also seized from the office of a 37 year-old man who is claimed to be the organizer behind the “criminal activity”. He was arrested.

The Ministry goes on to state the operators of the websites had been profiting from the distribution of copyright content to the tune of $3.34 million by charging users to access material via premium SMS services. One TorrentFreak reader familiar with the situation noted that SMS providers in Bulgaria can take as much as 40-50% of each SMS payment, so the amount allegedly generated should be treated with caution.

While the four busted sites did accept SMS payments, as with many one click hosters, premium accounts with greater features were available for a price. The sites also gave users the ability to use their facilities for free.

Although the head of Bulgaria’s Computer Crimes Department had threatened action against Zamunda and Arena BG “and their servers that supply pirated movies and music and take money from their users via premium SMS”, both torrent sites remain operational today. However, research on the backgrounds of two of the raided sites, 4Storing and Afasta, appears to show some earlier links to ArenaBG although the exact nature of these connections remain unclear.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Rather than limited action against one site, the picture emerging today shows a concerted attempt by the police to take down many other Bulgarian trackers, both those hosted in their home country and others hosted elsewhere. A special police unit usually dedicated to fighting organized crime recently starting working to identify the administrators of the sites. Once identified, the police set about making contact with them, and each was invited to a meeting.

At the meeting the administrators were ordered to shut down the sites. There were no explanations as to why they should, or which laws were being put into effect, but the order was clear – shut down the sites or the police will come and take the servers. Below is a rundown of sites that are currently affected, but we can’t confirm yet that all of these administrators were actually at the meetings.

ArenaBG, at one stage thought to be one of the larger European trackers, currently displays the message, “Dear user, We were forced to close our website.” The site was hosted at LeaseWeb in The Netherlands. However, the site has an alternative URL at 0.arenabg.com and appears to be setting up a new open tracker, which can be found at free.arenabg.com.

With 120,000 users, P2PBG is a pretty significant site. Although still visible, the site has been ordered by the police to cease tracking torrents. P2PBG is hosted in Bulgaria.

The MastersTB tracker has disappeared. AvatarBG, another Bulgarian tracker is currently down, but links on the homepage show a forum and alternative domain available elsewhere.

A site which intends to close altogether is Torrent-BG. There is no longer a torrent section on the site and the site owner says he will even give away the domain to a worthwhile new owner. Another site set to disappear is WordBG, and the administrators of Zarta.org have announced that the site will no longer have a BitTorrent tracker, and that it will go in a new direction. All sites were hosted in Bulgaria.

Currently, Bulgaria’s largest BitTorrent tracker Zamunda.net is fully operational. It has around 500,000 members with a tracker serving up to a peak of 1.8 million peers.

If any reader has additional information on this developing story, please contact us in confidence.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The site’s success didn’t last, however, as Bulgarian authorities have just shut down the site after being tipped off by the Bulgarian Association of Musical Producers (BAMP), a music industry lobby group.

This case is again a prime example how the music industry and law enforcement agencies work together seamlessly. Investigators from the music industry handed over ‘evidence’ to the Bulgarian authorities, who went on to raid the site in question. Justice is meant to be blind, but it clearly isn’t in this case.

This case is not unique in this regard. IFPI, an anti-piracy lobby group for the music industry has helped gathering evidence against OiNK as well, claiming it was a criminal operation where hundreds and thousands of dollars were made. More recently IFPI was involved in the Italian Pirate Bay blockade, where they assisted the local authorities, and hosted the server where the takedown notice was hosted.

As we’ve pointed out before, in most police investigations, if a police officer is directly involved in a crime, he or she is usually unable to participate in the investigation, as being involved reduces that person’s objectivity. Justice is meant to be blind, not fueled by thoughts of personal redemption or vengeance. It is unfortunate that most authorities seem to be unaware of this principle.

This is not the first time Bulgarian authorities have gone after a BitTorrent site. In 2006, the administrator of Arenabg.com, the largest BitTorrent tracker in the country, was arrested by the police. The admin was later released due to “lack of grounds for his arrest”, but the government ordered an IP-block of the site nevertheless, which led to massive protests.

TorrentValley didn’t have the large fanbase Arenabg.com had, so protests are not to be expected this time. At this point it is also unclear if action has been taken against the administrator of the site.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.