TorrentFreak reports that a copyright troll has been running a torrent-based "honeypot" to lure potential lawbreakers into downloading copyrighted content. This bait is reportedly maintained by Pirate Bay user "Sharkmp4" who has been discovered to be directly connected to anti-piracy law firm Prenda Law. Comcast confirmed the connection in its response to a subpoena dated August 2.

According to the report, Prenda and its boss John Steele were first accused of baiting torrent downloaders back in June in an expert report supplied by Devin Neville who works at a company that monitors BitTorrent activity. He said that the law firm was actually seeding the very content it claims to protect, and was using torrents originating from Pirate Bay user Sharkmp4 as evidence in its lawsuits.

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Wanting to expose the honeypot, The Pirate Bay conducted an investigation and provided the IP addresses of the suspects in question used to upload the torrents. However, given that The Pirate Bay wipes all IP addresses from its database after 48 hours, the team jumped into the encrypted, older backups to produce a long list of addresses.

This information then became evidence in the piracy-based case AF Holdings vs. Patel. The presiding judge gave an approval of discovery to both parties in the case, thus defense lawyer Blair Chintella distributed a series of subpoenas, one of which covered a Comcast IP address used by Sharkmp4 on The Pirate Bay list. After a few weeks Comcast matched Sharkmp4's address with one of its subscribers: Steele Hansmeier PLLC aka the former law firm of John Steele and Paul Hansmeier.

With that information in hand, Blair Chintella has distributed another batch of subpoenas to uncover even more details about Prenda Law's alleged torrent-based honeypot. The discovery portion of this lawsuit is still ongoing, and is scheduled to conclude on September 2. TorrentFreak points out that Prenda Law is now being haunted by the very IP address subpoenas it has used to pressure file sharers into paying thousands of dollars in settlement fees.

AF Holdings, LLC is a shell entity that's typically represented by Prenda Law. The firm has filed hundreds of copyright infringement lawsuits against thousands of "John Doe" defendants across the country that have been accused of sharing copyrighted material through BitTorrent. The piracy claim against Rajesh Patel was filed on November 2, 2012 in the Georgia Northern District Court.

Back in April, Ars Technica reported that Prenda had actually obtained a default judgment against Patel because he failed to respond to the lawsuit. However, the law firm is supposedly seeking a dismissal in the case without Patel having to pay any piracy-related damages in an attempt to contain a fallout regarding AF Holdings, LLC. There have been accusations made that Prenda stole the identity of a Minnesota man named Alan Cooper, named him CEO of the shell company, and allegedly forged the fake CEO's signature on AF Holdings legal documents. The actual Alan Cooper was supposedly Steele's former caretaker, and has sued Steele for stealing his identity.

There also seems to be audio evidence provided by GoDaddy revealing that Prenda boss John Steele has pretended to be Alan Cooper and another individual named Mark Lutz in phone conversations. That said, there's more to this story than baiting BitTorrent users on The Pirate Bay. TorrentFreak has a bit more on this latest development here, as does Techdirt.

Overall, there seems to be quite the scam going on: upload a torrent to The Pirate Bay, seed the listed copyrighted content, and scoop up all the fishies nibbling at the bait. Then take those nibblers to court, make them pay out-of-court damages, and pocket the money. Rinse and repeat.