January 04, 2010 by sharky
Traders. Scammers. Invite Sellers. Cheaters. If there aren’t already enough ways to wind up banned at private trackers, there’s a brand-new online app that can help you achieve your goal. Move over, uTraitor - RatioCheat is a clientless webservice that allows users to upload their .torrent files to build fake ratio statistics on private tracker accounts.
Disclaimer: In no way, shape or form does FSF promote ratio cheating whatsoever. If you choose to use RatioCheat, assume the distinct possibility of being caught; and thus promptly banned on your tracker(s) without warning. Private trackers have sophisticated methods of catching such behavior.
Before everyone posts comments such as, "so then why did FSF choose to make this info public? This is scandalous!" - the answer is two-fold:
1. For anyone dumb enough to use RatioCheat or any other method to falsify data; let this be a stern warning. It is not worth the risk. Then again, for those of you who do (and eventually get caught) - then you weren’t worthy to use private trackers in the first place. Consider it a form of ‘culling of the herd’.
2. To bring awareness to private tracker sysops & staff that such a tool is publicly available, and to take appropriate action.
How it works:
RatioCheat is a Python script that simulates uploaded data to private trackers in order to increase your overall site ratio. In contrast to certain modified BitTorrent clients which can report unrealistic amounts of uploaded data, RatioCheat will only go as far as 1.0 on a torrent. For example; a torrent with a data size of 1.38GB will only report 1.38GB "uploaded" to the tracker.
While the process takes only 10 seconds to complete, results are not instantaneous as seen through the tracker account stats. Usually at least one full announce cycle has to be completed first.
Does RatioCheat really work?
According to the author on the RatioCheat Blog, it *should* work with most trackers (especially those based on TorrentBits source code), although in our own tests we achieved very limited success. We tested it on about 20 different trackers and found RatioCheat to be effective on only a handful; including these older (and larger) trackers: Cheggit, PureTNA & Empornium - all of which are based on the original TorrentBits code. It is also said to work with Demonoid (why even bother?), although we were unsuccessful in our attempt.
Smaller, more obscure (newer) trackers didn’t fare so well. We generated a success rate of 0% on 15 different tested trackers that use either TBDev, TorrentStrike (TS SE) or BtiT/XBtiT source code - thus it would indeed appear that the majority of private trackers are safe (at least for now).
Alarmingly, RatioCheat worked on all three of our ‘test’ Gazelle trackers that we tried it on (JamBands, NorTV & PM5.com) - so this is definitely something that Gazelle sysops should be watching out for. Torrents that are not reported as "snatched" (but were physically downloaded) which also report upload data should be fairly easy to spot.
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