Piratetorrents.nu, formerly one of Sweden's largest private BitTorrent communities, has shut down fearing the authorities may come after them. The abrupt decision comes a few weeks after police in Sweden and Germany raided the XNT.nu BitTorrent tracker and arrested two of the alleged operators of the site.

Last month the private BitTorrent tracker XNT.nu was raided, a site which had risen from the ashes of other sites shut down by the authorities in 2009. The raid and arrests in this new case have now claimed another casualty in the form of Piratetorrents.nu.

With roughly 17,000 members Piratetorrents.nu was one of the largest private BitTorrent trackers still standing in Sweden, but as of this week the site is no more. While numerous private trackers shut their doors every year, it’s not often that a site’s staff are so open about their decisions as they are this time.

“As you can see, our website and tracker are not working anymore, this is because we don’t dare take any more risks! All of the staff have a private life to think about, and they no longer want to take the risks inherent in running a tracker,” Piratetorrents’ staff announced.

“In other words, we are throwing in the towel and ending this business before something possibly happens to us in staff. There are too many laws and rules against this stuff and it’s not worth the punishment,” the message adds

A source close to the site’s staff informed TorrentFreak that the raid of XNT and the subsequent arrests had a major impact on the decision to close the site.

Over the years Sweden has proven to be one of the most active countries when it comes to taking action against BitTorrent sites, and the site’s operators were no longer willing to put everything on the line.

Adding to the XNT raid there was also a Scene notice posted recently, with information on another site that was allegedly used to automatically upload content to Piratetorrents. To make matters even worse, this notice also linked one of the XNT arrestees to the Piratetorrents tracker.

“Another p2p-tard who was involved in Piratetorrents autobot is pulchi, he was just caught by the Swedish police in a bust, due to his involvement in another tracker called xnt.nu,” the Scene notice reads.

The demise of Piratetorrents is yet another example illustrating that Sweden is not the safe haven for torrent sites some believed it to be. Although the largest torrent site on the Internet is still active there, many smaller sites have either quit or moved abroad.