Yesterday the US authorities arrested the owner of KAT in Poland. The Ukrainian is accused of copyright infringement under the US laws, and also charged with money laundering. Therefore the feds have now seized many domains operated for KickassTorrents. Right now the main search bar is offline and a lot of people are unhappy for seeing KickassTorrents down.

KAT has become the most used public torrent site in the world. The torrent directory receives millions of unique visits per day and is even more popular than other large torrent sources. However, KickassTorrents got a setback yesterday when the US authorities arrested the owner of this torrent site, the 30 years old Ukrainian Artem Vaulin. He was captured in Poland. The US government now accuses the young man of criminal copyright violation and also money laundering. The US District Court in Chicago is going to proceed with the case.

Steps to capture the owner included the feds acting as an advertiser for the website, so they became aware of a bank account connected to KickassTorrents. Secondly, Apple gave the authorities personal data of Artem Vaulin after they matched an IP address used for iTunes with the IP address used for logging in to KAT’s Facebook account.

Together with arresting the owner, the bank account and several domain names got seized. One of the attorneys working on this case commented that KickassTorrents was the source for piracy worth over one billion dollars. He added that Vaulin used servers of different locations worldwide and changed domain names because of continuous issues from the authorities.

At the very moment, several websites connected to KAT are not loading. Though some proxy sites are up and running, there is yet no update from the team behind KickassTorrents for additional details.