Exposing the World of Tracker Invite Selling, Trading

October 10, 2010 by Buddhas Son

The world of private BitTorrent trackers revolves around basic principles of trust, friendship, and sharing. To break into the world of private trackers, it all starts with one invite. One account made where you realize what it takes to seed a torrent to a 1:1 ratio, what a pre-time is, what an announce channel is, the works. What happens when you are ready for a new tracker, when you have sucked the current tracker bone dry? Well the answer is that now it is time to go scrounging for an invite. Hmm, how do I get an invite? Well a normal person would get their invite from a thread in their tracker’s forum, or they would ask a friend, or they would start working their way up in one of the million tracker invite forums, or they would try to jump into a recruitment irc and get in to a tracker that way.

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Tracker’s Invites Being Offered Through Facebook = Facepalm

February 02, 2010 by sharky

Today, FSF received what could be interpreted as an alarming email; one private tracker in particular is offering the opportunity for Facebook members to request invites through their tracker’s official Facebook page. At first glance this plan seemed innovative & unique - but is all this really a good idea? Our hunch is that it’s probably not in anyone’s best interest to connect a Facebook account to a private tracker. But what do we know? Reader feedback on this is encouraged, but we’ll outline some key points.

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Vizz.tv Selling Access, Accounts to New TV Tracker

October 02, 2009 by sharky

Well, there’s P2L and then there’s this. The creators of Bitt.tv have shut down the site due to lack of donations in favor of a different model that charges $24 USD for a yearly subscription to their new ratio-free TV tracker at http://vizz.tv. So instead of running a top-notch torrent tracker (which they obviously failed at) where members will gladly donate, why not charge a one-time flat fee just so members can gain entrance? - without even offering a single iota of detail about what’s behind the $24 curtain. Talk about taking the ‘free’ out of BitTorrent - here’s the message staff sent out today to existing members of Bitt.tv:

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How to Promote Your New Tracker: Just Buy eMail Addresses From Others

July 24, 2009 by sharky

"Where did my invite come from?" You signed up for a private tracker using a valid email address, and got invited to a different one - out of the blue. Sounds cool? Think again. While the prospect of getting into a new tracker "no strings attached" may seem convenient, the scenario is actually quite scary: where did they get your email address from? Should you dismiss it as some some phishing scam designed to steal your name/password to use on your elite sites, or is your email address on a "for sale" list? Probably the latter.

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Why You Shouldn’t Trade - Staff, Members Face Ban

March 28, 2009 by sharky

If you’re an invite trader, you may find yourself on the business end of the banhammer on popular torrent forums and private trackers alike. Well known for being an invite trading forum - which doesn’t bode well with private trackers - Swedish-based torrentinvites.se staff and members now have a lot more to worry about with the recent alliance between certain torrent discussion boards and popular trackers - in a bold crackdown bid to oust traders from the scene.

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Ratio Faker: Your New Best Friend To Get Tracker Banned

March 12, 2009 by sharky

Private tracker sysops & admins may have a brand-new headache on their hands with Ratio Faker. Self praising, "Ratio Faker can help you keep a good ratio in private bittorrent trackers." Actually, Ratio Faker is a new third-party utility that can (and probably will) assist you in getting banned from your favorite private trackers. It works through your existing BitTorrent client by reporting inaccurate upload and download stats to the tracker, thus boosting your ratio. Hey, at the very least you’ll go out with a good ratio, before finding yourself unable to login.

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Discordia Takes Over ‘Lphant’ P2P Domain; Now Owns Shareaza, BearShare, Lphant & iMesh.com

March 05, 2009 by sharky

Anti-P2P group Discordia Ltd., who made headlines in late 2007 with the controversial commandeering of Shareaza’s official domain, has now surreptitiously acquired Lphant. Discordia began with takeovers of BearShare.com & iMesh.com - and most notably Shareaza.com - evidently their slick tactics are again at work with the recent acquisition of Lphant.com.

While the Lphant peer-to-peer program was never a well-known client among giants such as BearShare, Shareaza and even iMesh - but by right it certainly has (or had) it’s own userbase. Obviously this conquest comes at little cost to Discordia for a domain of such little importance nowadays; perhaps the point is irrelevant. For years now, peer-to-peer users have been shying away from these all-in-one applications in favor of a more efficient, trustworthy distributed network known as BitTorrent.

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Private Tracker Invites For Sale at TorrentInvites.org

December 17, 2008 by sharky

If it were April 1st, we’d put a lot more scrutiny into what we’re about to report. It would appear that TorrentInvites.org is selling private tracker invites. Just in time for Christmas, you can now purchase your very own favorite private tracker, for you or a loved one. And some of them are even on sale; such as What.cd which is going for $9.95 USD. Ironically, that’s much less painful than waiting to take their IRC invite quiz.

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Demonoid Users Beware - Be Careful What You Download

September 27, 2008 by sharky

As a rule, private trackers are more secure than public ones. However, what many members of Demonoid don’t realize is that most of the popular torrents are using public trackers - which is just about everything that has a huge swarm of seeders & leechers. Thus, you may as well just be downloading from ThePirateBay or Mininova; essentially it’s the same thing. So why is it that Demonoid users are shocked when they receive nasty eletters from their ISPs admonishing them for downloading copyrighted content? That’s exactly what’s happening, and the complaints are rolling in on many of the torrents.

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Public Torrent Users Beware: The Next-gen Torrent Scam

August 30, 2008 by sharky

Unless you happened to be fortunate enough to start out on BitTorrent through the great world of private trackers, you’ve probably fallen for some pretty intricate public torrent scams in your time. And let’s face it - we’ve all been duped into downloading password-protected torrents, only to have to click on external links to find that elusive password on sites that we just shouldn’t need to be visiting. Some of us may have been forced to acquire a special media player (such as DOM) to play that movie you just spent three days downloading. But all of this is child’s play compared to the new generation of torrent scams.

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Private Trackers For Sale on eBay? What’s Next?

July 22, 2008 by sharky

From Shill Bidders to fake Feedback Ratings, fraudulent listings and hijacked accounts, eBay has always been a haven for scammers. So maybe that’s why we’re not surprised to see prominent BitTorrent trackers up for bid there.

Yes, folks - for only $0.99 USD you can bid on an invite to What.cd, STMusic.org and even Torrent-Damage. And shipping is included! Got a little more to part with? Why not scoop up TL for $25?

We personally like this What.cd seller’s ‘disclaimer’ to eBay, to justify his actions:

"Note to ebay: I hold an account on this website and possess this invite, this is my PERSONALLY owned invitation that I may choose to use either way I please I donated to what.cd to obtain this invitation so i hold all grounds to do what ever i wish this is in accordance with this the listing should not be removed. Thank you for your understanding."

We Call Bullshit: If What.cd finds out who you are, you and your entire invite tree will be disabled permanently.

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Movie Download Scam Sites

March 06, 2008 by sharky

Start your dream movie collection today! 100% free movie downloads. No download fees ever! You have come to the right place; with us you can access all the movies available on the Internet instantly! The setup takes less than one minute! We Guarantee 100% satisfaction! We are 100% sure our service will satisfy your needs and therefore we can offer you a satisfaction guarantee for 60 days! And we also guarantee you a never ending flow of new movies, mp3’s, games and softwares for you to add to your collection. Our service is EASY to use! You can download movies for free!” - scam website.

Sounds catchy, doesn’t it? Here’s our take on movie download sites, and what you can do to avoid being sucked in to THE SCAM. Want some REAL movie download sites, tips and info? You’ve already come to the right place.

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Bad P2P Websites

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The iPod Music Money Scam

January 04, 2008 by sharky

Getting media files for your iPod

Technically there are only three (online) ways to get media for your iPod or MP3 player. ‘Media’ being music, movies, tv shows, videos, audiobooks or any other files in support of an iPod.

— First, you could purchase it (legally) from iTunes, walmart.com, emusic.com or any other popular online music store. Prices generally range from 79 and 99 cents per song and $10 - $15 per full album. iTunes alone has sold over 3 billion songs as of August 2007 - obviously a popular choice among iPod users.

— Second, you could simply download it for free (illegally) using any P2P program such as Limewire, BitTorrent or any other free file sharing program. Then just import the MP3s, AVIs and whatnot into your iTunes application and transfer to your iPod. Without question, an even more popular choice!

— Third, you can pay a one-time or monthly/yearly fee to download it (illegally, still) from any number of websites that offer this service. All downloading is still done through a “free” P2P program and has nothing to do with the website, with the price attached firmly to the service or support. We don’t know how popular this is, but we’d like to stomp it out anyways!

It’s this third option that we want to go into some detail about:

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P2P Programs That Don’t Connect

January 02, 2008 by sharky

P2P Programs that don’t connect (and other things to avoid)

In our unabated drive to find P2P networks that people are using to share files (old and new, big or small), we’ve searched high and low for every and all networks that people could possibly be using to swap files. Many of our sources for these P2P programs, and the working ones, came from the SourceForge website. We conducted searches for “file sharing” and “P2P” software - and shoveled through the massive list of 620 different results. From these results we tossed out all the ’source code only’ queries (we’re not about to start compiling code, and likely neither are you - so we only tested things that contained an executable *.EXE file) although we did test some *.JAR/class files under Java.

It should be noted that these aren’t bad P2P programs - they simply don’t connect to a viable network or people using them (as is). We tried our best to get these apps to connect through various tweaked settings and system requirements, but to no avail. We even resorted to search engines to try and find users/forums that lay out special instructions, database files of users, or IP network addresses to import. Perhaps we’re wrong about some of them - there’s a chance they’ve turned into elusive darknets that we couldn’t circumvent. However you slice it, these are time-wasters for most general filesharers! (most links are included if you want to have a go for yourself).

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P2P Programs That Contain Adware

January 02, 2008 by sharky

P2P programs that contain adware/spyware. (and worse)

This is a list of some of the P2P programs that contain adware - and there are others - especially newer P2P programs with flashy names. Note that some of these P2P applications contain adware/spyware that cannot be de-selected during the installation (i.e. ‘opted out of’) and some can be. Both types are categorized in this list. Read the description of each for more information.

We include the version of the infracting software, but don’t assume all other versions of the same software are safe. Usually when a company decides to place adware/spyware in software - they’ll do it for all versions. It is the program itself that should be avoided, not a specific version of it.

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P2P Programs That Cost Money (Avoid These)

January 01, 2008 by sharky

Avoid These Fee-based P2P clients/services. (Re-branding)

On the P2P scene, re-branding is regarded as a scam when certain stealth operating companies have cloned an ‘open source‘ brand and use advertisements that generally consist of deceptive search engine ads and inexpensive ‘google adsense’-style ads. In hopes of making money, they charge for “support” that is often just a copy of the wiki or other documentation from the original program’s website - all under the pretext of providing customer service. Combine all this with a slightly-modified GUI and *presto* - a new monetizing program is born - one that was completely free in the first place.

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Bad P2P Programs - What To Avoid

December 09, 2007 by sharky

Some contain crazy spyware; some you just can’t connect to anymore; and some just want your money. Either way, steer clear.

— Adware/spyware-laden P2P clients
— Pay-to-use P2P services/programs
— The iPod $ Music Scam
— P2P programs that don’t connect
— Other things to avoid

Below is a list of some outstandingly BAD P2P clients, as tested in Dec. 2007 - each with a summary. They could have fit into ALL of the categories above.

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