How To Identify Fake Torrents Uploaded By Anti-piracy Organizations

Did you know that MPAA, RIAA and several anti-piracy organizations are always setting traps for pirates and are constantly trying to trap people to get caught of downloading copyright materials?

The anti-piracy organizations can easily trace you when they upload a very popular .torrent file to some popular torrent tracker site. When you download the .torrent file and load it, your bittorrent client will start connecting to the anti-piracy organizations trackers. That’s when they record your IP address and can possible get in touch with you for downloading copyrighted materials!

This is a very scary trap because we know a lot of people who knows how to download from bittorrent but don’t know anything about peer, leecher, tracker and etc… In short, they don’t know how bittorrent works but they know that by waiting for days, the download will complete and they get what they want.

Here’s how we can identify if the Torrent or Tracker is fake.

To make these traps more visible Fenopy has created a Fake Finder page that lists the most popular fake torrents and the latest fake trackers. It also allows you to search for fake torrents by keyword or infohash.

The actual .torrent links for these fake files are blocked, and FakeFinder serves an informational purpose only. It is actually quite amusing to browse through these fake files and trackers.

After taking a look at the whole list of all fake torrents and the filename looks pretty real. There’s no way we can know whether the torrent is fake or not unless it’s listed on Fenopy Fake Finder list.

Although most of the IPs of these fake trackers are already blocked by blocklist software like PeerGuardian, they still manage to collect the IP addresses of thousands of users who do fall for this trap. Most torrent site admins are aware of these fakes, and remove them as soon as they are uploaded.

If you’re using uTorrent, here’s how to check which tracker are you connecting to.

After loading torrent file to your bittorrent client, look at the “General” tab and you’ll see “Tracker URL”. If the tracker URL is listed on Fenopy Fake Finder, please, don’t even start downloading it!

Tagged as: bit torrent, fenopy, MPAA, RIAA, torrent, tracker, utorrent