MPAA's file fakery exposed

Aa most of you interweb-savvy thieving pirates will be well aware, mighty industry bullies such as the MPAA are well suspected for sticking up fake torrents onto torrent indexers to catch out would-be downloaders.

Torrentfreak reports that almost all of these legally dodgy servers are located in Southern California and Las Vegas. The tricksy servers are easy to track for those in the know thanks to certain patterns, says torrentfreak, such as the content of the trackers and the amount of torrent seeds on the files.

A btjunkie admin says that the industry bigwigs alter the trackers to make sure that the downloaded content either stalls at near-completion, for example at 90 per cent, or the file will just be a big old blank mess. It's certainly professional work, says the anonymous btjunkie admin: "That's a lot of servers to set up and it takes some expertise to set up in the manner that they did it." The admin goes on to say, suspiciously, that "I don't think I really need to say who would spend money on something like this."

Some servers to be on the look out for, should you be one of those downloading sorts, are hostnames such as 101tracker.dhcp.biz, aplustorrents.qhigh.com, bitnova.squirly.info, bittorment.ocry.com and pirate-trakkrz.leet.la, warns torrentfreak. These hostnames can all be traced back to the very same IP ranges, says the site.

It's reckoned by one torrentfreak reader that the IP ranges belong to Media Defender which is a company hired by copyright owners to keep track of piratey IP addresses.