On Wednesday, July 20, 2016, 30-year-old Ukrainian Artem Vaulin, the alleged operator of torrent directory website KickassTorrents (KAT) was arrested in Poland. He has been charged with copyright infringement and money laundering; domain names related to KAT’s operation have also been sized by the United States government. In order to discover and capture Vaulin, the U.S. government used its power of subpoena to compel Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Coinbase Inc. to release information that led to his arrest.

KickassTorrents is one of the most used torrent directories on the entire Internet in spite of numerous censorship attempts by world governments—including domain name seizures by the U.S. Department of Justice and blocks from ISPs in many countries including those in the U.K., Ireland, Belgium and Malaysia (Wikipedia “KickassTorrents -Blocking and Censorship”)—as of January 2015, its kat.sr domain held an Alexa rank of 151. Investigators listed the site as the 69th most visited website in the world in the criminal complaint [PDF].

The Apple iTunes and Facebook connection

According to the criminal complaint filed against Vaulin by the U.S. government, officers posed as an advertiser on the KAT website which revealed bank account associated with the website.

“Records provided by Apple showed that tirm@me.com conducted an iTunes transaction using IP Address 109.86.226.203 on or about July 31, 2015. The same IP Address was used on the same day to login into the KAT Facebook,” reads the affidavit (page 34) [PDF].

According to an article in PC World, the iTunes account connected to the e-mail address led to two IP addresses. Both of these addresses were connected to the Facebook account promoting KickassTorrents. The Apple e-mail account also contained dozens of messages mentioning the torrent website, including mentions of its maintenance and operation.

Image credit: Coinbase Inc.

How Coinbase is involved

After using information obtained from Apple iTunes and Facebook, U.S. authorities turned to San Francisco-based Bitcoin wallet, exchange and merchant processor Coinbase. In 2012, KickassTorrents began accepting bitcoin donations. According to Bitcoin.com News, information received from Coinbase revealed that the account attached to that address was registered to Artem Vaulin located in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

“A total of $72,767 worth of Bitcoin (valued at the time of transaction) was deposited into Vaulin’s Coinbase account,” reads the affidavit (page 39-40) [PDF] where information subpoenaed from Coinbase is discussed.

The amount listed, $72,767 USD comes out to approximately 110.3 BTC at the current exchange rate.

Advocates of Bitcoin often mention it as a solution to overcome censorship and financial blockades used by governments in order to suppress the activities of websites such as Kim Dotcom’s MegaUpload (which became Mega Ltd.), WikiLeaks and torrent trackers such as KickassTorrents. While financial systems may withdraw from such sites, it is still possible for them to make money via Bitcoin to remain operating.

There is also a contingent of the community that suggests the use of Bitcoin in order to maintain privacy. However, services such as Coinbase operate under U.S. law and therefore must respond to subpoenas for information from government agencies. As a result, account holder’s information can and will be released to the authorities if a warrant or subpoena is issued.

Featured image credit: Homeland Security Investigations and Internal Revenue Service notice of seizure posted on http://kickass.to/