The Pirate Bay, KickAssTorrents and isoHunt make their usual appearances but among them are always Zamunda and ArenaBG, two Bulgarian torrent trackers that are not only their country’s biggest, but also some of the most significant in the entire region.

Numerous actions have taken against both sites up to and including criminal investigations but none have succeeded in causing any real damage to either the trackers or their popularity. Today, however, Zamunda is sailing through unchartered waters and facing a catastrophic setback engineered not by local or U.S. authorities, but by a trusted member of staff.

Late Saturday night / Sunday morning, secret changes were taking place at Zamunda. A former site admin, coder and web designer who still helped out on the site decided that he would seize control. In what insiders told TorrentFreak was a carefully planned and executed operation, the site’s domain (zamunda.net) was taken over and redirected to a previously prepared set of servers.

As soon as the redirect had taken place the real Zamunda database was deleted along with several historical backups with the intention that the site could never return under its original owners.

With the majority of users oblivious to the switch the ‘new’ Zamunda – operating on the old domain of course – continued as if nothing had happened. However, things didn’t go to plan. The hijacker failed to anticipate how much server power would be required to run the site resulting in an announcement that unexpected loading issues were being experienced. There were also announcements relating to a possible hack attack, none of which made any real sense.

With all the upheaval it’s no surprise what came next. Former admins and moderators were all banned from the hijacked site along with anyone who tried to discuss the problems in the site’s forums. Mail between site members was deleted and any opposition was quashed.

However, while the hijacker had succeeded in taking over the site and deleting some backups, he hadn’t managed to delete them all. A “90% working” copy of Zamunda had been missed and within a day it had been put back online under two previously prepared backup domains – Zamunda.se and Zelka.org. But even after the setup of the new site there were further problems.

“I can confirm that the [former admin] managed a limited hack on zamunda.se deleting 10,000 torrents which will be restored from backup data,” a source close to the site told TorrentFreak.

So with two sites online it’s now a question of which will survive. Zamunda.net has the advantage of operating under the traditional URL with a full database. What it doesn’t have is the support of the site’s former staff and according to our sources it is also missing a torrent site’s most valuable commodity. Content uploaders are vital if a site is to remain popular and reports suggest they are fleeing the ship.

“The upload rate has decreased by at least 90% by rough calculations. For two days 40 torrents have been uploaded compared to roughly 10 to 15 times more the week before,” we were informed.

“However, there are still a lot of peers, seeders and leechers,” a second source added. “But that site is a lost cause now, no one supports it, and only the users are losing from this battle. The new tracker [Zamunda.se] is growing fast but it needs to grow from the beginning.”

The big question now is why the former admin took the decision to take over the site. After an initial period of smoke and mirrors he now claims he did it for the users, to protect them from admins that had become too greedy and powerful through their totalitarian regime.

“After an internal coup, these wicked people were removed from the management of the site and the whole system no longer belongs to them. We can not allow the freedom of the P2P community to be used for populist political purposes,” the hijacker said in a statement.

One of our sources agreed that rule on the site was indeed tight but added that to control so many users it was probably a necessary evil. Nevertheless, the motivation for the takeover and whether it was sincere or not has now become a side issue.

“In my opinion the takeover was a big mistake,” a source told TorrentFreak. “Since there’s no support it’ll be hard for this ‘fake’ site to survive, and it’ll take years for the new tracker [and old community] to get back on their feet and once again become one of the most popular Bulgarian sites with one of the biggest communities.”

Only time will tell if that will come to pass but it’s interesting to consider that one man has been able to achieve what the combined resources of Hollywood, the record industry and two governments could not. Although nothing has worked up to now, maybe that thought will prompt the site’s return to its rightful owners.

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

However, despite their sabre-rattling the country’s biggest BitTorrent sites, ArenaBG and Zamunda, have remained up. Threats by pirate-hunter-in-chief Yavor Kolev, who in July 2010 vowed to take them down, came to nothing.

Then in the early hours of Saturday morning, all hell broke loose. At 1am Zamunda went down, quickly followed by ArenaBG. A posting on the latter’s separate forum spelled doom.

“Once again the virtual society of free sharing of information is under threat,” began the announcement on ArenaBG on the back of the chaotic situation at both sites.

“The initiator of this work is a secret group called ‘Council for the Protection of Intellectual Property’. Formally, this organization seems like an inter-ministerial body, but its meetings are invited and attended mostly by representatives of the so-called ‘Rightholders’,” noted the lengthy posting. It concluded by confirming the site’s defiant intentions of bouncing back against any further attacks on its domain name or servers.

Little wonder then that this dramatic version of events was quickly reported by several news outlets in Bulgaria, some with the apparent confirmation that the government had hacked or DDoS’d the sites in question and taken them offline.

However, TorrentFreak has discovered that there may be a more simple explanation for the downtime at both sites.

According to a source close to Zamunda, late Friday night the site suffered what is being described as “a technical malfunction of a crucial piece of equipment”. The extended downtime that followed was due to the failure happening during the night.

“The problem has been taken care of and measures have been taken in order to improve [future] response to emergency situations of any sort that can lead to temporary server unavailability,” our source added.

So while this clears up the situation at Zamunda, how does one explain the problems at ArenaBG? As boring and simple as it sounds, it seems that when Zamunda went down Bulgarians needed an immediate replacement site so thousands of them flooded to the next logical choice – ArenaBG. The site simply couldn’t cope and went down under the load.

While there are reports today that Yavor Kolev of the Computer Crime Department has denied any involvement in the downtime, he also took the opportunity to warn the sites that since they continue to “break the law” they can expect attention in the future.

The panic in Bulgaria this weekend certainly shows that the country’s BitTorrent community exists on a knife edge. Only time will tell if their position becomes more or less secure in 2011 but if Kolev is to be believed, it might be the latter. The signs are, however, that neither site intends to go quietly.

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

Last month the Bulgarian Ministry of Internal Affairs targeted what it described as a “criminal network” of file-hosting services which allegedly generated more than $3 million. The raids were described as the country’s biggest ever action against file-sharing sites.

These one-click hosters had loose links to one of Bulgaria’s biggest torrent sites, ArenaBG. Another giant is the internationally known tracker, Zamunda.net. Both sites have been the target of previous legal action and threats but remain operational today.

For previous high-ranking staff at Zamunda, however, the torrent experience is far from over. This September, ex-owner Martin Pavlov and ex-admin Dimitar Tzankov will appear before the Sofia District Court charged with crimes against copyright and intellectual property.

The investigation against Zamunda began in 2006 following a complaint from multimedia streaming company, Amotera BG. In a letter to GDBOP – the Unit for Combating Organized Crime – Amotera director Adrian Tzenov said that films were uploaded to Zamunda without his company’s consent.

However, shortly after the investigation began, Pavlov allegedly sold Zamunda to an unknown individual in Amsterdam and the site’s domain was transferred to the United States. Rumors suggest that the site is now owned by a Syrian.

“We cannot stop the website, since it isn’t the property of the two defendants any more,” prosecutor Detelina Iotova told Trud.bg.

“It is now evident that all institutions and not only the Ministry of Interior are realizing their role in the battle against piracy and are taking actions against it,” said Computer Crimes Department chief Yavor Kolev. “We hope that there will be sentences for Zamunda and Arenabg as there were in Sweden for ThePirateBay.”

Not all of the targets in the crackdown have been big ones though. At the end of June the Bulgarian Ministry of Internal Affairs announced that following complaints from the Bulgarian publishing industry, a raid had been carried out against Chitanka, an online book library which was deemed “damaging to culture”. Despite the upheaval, that site quickly bounced back and remains online.

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.

Within days Yavor Kolev, the head of Bulgaria’s Computer Crimes Department, announced on TV that he would take harsh action against BitTorrent sites. He confirmed that his first two targets would be the country’s largest trackers.

“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 along with various other claims about the sites and how they operate.

TorrentFreak managed to make contact with someone with close connections to one of the sites who told us that in the week leading up to Kolev’s announcement, there had been an intense level of anti-filesharing “propaganda” in the media.

Furthermore, the aforementioned memorandum appears to be secret, so it’s unclear exactly what was agreed with the music industry. While it seems that a “3 strikes” option may have been included, Kolev went out of his way to say that torrent site users would not be a target.

There are also several other apparent contradictions or even errors in the police statements. Kolev stated that the Computer Crimes Department will only be going after sites that generate revenue from premium SMS memberships. However, neither ArenaBG nor Zamunda.net generate income in this manner – both sites are sustained by advertising.

So are there many other torrent sites operating with SMS payments? We are informed that there aren’t. Once sites found out years ago that SMS payments made them a target for legal action, they were quickly removed and now the majority of sites operate within boundaries that should, in theory, keep them on the right side of the law. We are informed that part of the original case against ArenaBG was based on the existence of a paid VIP membership (it was still possible to be a regular member for free) but that system is now long gone.

There are police cases pending against both Zamunda and ArenaBG for 4 years now and yet they are still operating. Hoping that these will result in a closure of the sites seems optimistic. TorrentFreak is informed that both cases have reached a complete dead end because there is zero evidence against any Bulgarian citizen. Since those raids a few smaller “home-operated” trackers have been intimidated to close down but no further action has been taken against Zamunda or ArenaBG.

It is also interesting that both trackers have chosen to implement a policy of rights holder co-operation and are actively removing torrents on request, but we’re informed that rights holders seldom use this facility on either site.

The other line of attack increasingly being used to go after file-sharing sites is to intimidate ISPs, so could this be used in Bulgaria? Our contact tells that the police have extensive powers to confiscate equipment to check for “illegal activity” and that the country’s largest ISP has a record of complying with government requests whether they have a basis in law or not. Somewhat of an uncertain climate it seems.

So what does the future hold for the average Bulgarian file-sharer? In his announcements, Kolev stated that the ordinary file-sharer need not be concerned, promising that if people download for personal use, they will not be persecuted. IFPI, on the other hand, would love “3 Strikes”…

All in all the situation seems as clear as mud. Both Zamunda and ArenaBG are going strong and believe there is no legal basis to close them down under current copyright law, and regular file-sharers have almost been assured of immunity by the police. The key is probably in the ‘secret’ memorandum – time will tell if mere mortals will get to see it.

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

IFPI’s Frances Moore said that ISPs should be forced to take responsibility for illicit file-sharing and called for changes in the law.

On Tuesday this week, a memorandum was signed by Bulgaria’s Interior Minister and IFPI which effectively declared war on piracy in the country. It didn’t take long for its effects to be felt.

Yesterday Yavor Kolev, the head of Bulgaria’s Computer Crimes Department, announced on TV that he would do everything in his power to crack down on BitTorrent sites. He confirmed that his first two targets would be Zamunda.net and Arena.bg

“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. The users of the sites will not be arrested,” he said. “We’ll clean the web from Internet pirates and set up platforms for legal file downloads,” he added.

Cases against both Zamunda and Arena BG have been pending for 4 years but it’s believed that neither site is operated by Bulgarians. It’s claimed that Zamunda is operated by a Syrian and Arena BG a Russian.

Whether or not the authorities in Bulgaria will succeed in their quest is up for debate. Certainly Arena BG has a habit of reappearing quickly every time it encounters trouble.

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