One of the web’s most prominent TV pirates has shut down his torrent tracker because of a scam that resulted in the tracker’s domains being taken over by a hostile group.

According to TorrentFreak, the ‘domino effect’ that resulted in all of EZTV’s domains being taken over started when the scammers were able to get their hands on EZTV’s domain with a Italy TLD. Reportedly, the domain was suspended because of inaccurate whois information. When the domain became available for others to use (the real EZTV had then moved on to a .ch domain), the scammers purchased it with a UK registered company called EZCloud LTD. which was a similar name to what the real EZTV used.

The scammers then approached the EuroDNS registrar with their UK company, and by pretending that company had the same director as the real EZTV they were able to transfer the .se and .ch domains to their control.

EZTV’s proprietor, seeing that his empire had been lost to the scammers thanks to the careless security of EuroDNS, decide to throw in the towel and call it quits. For him EZTV was a labor of love, with revenue from the ads only covering server expenses.

The hijacked EZTV website is still operational, but many other large torrent trackers such as The Pirate Bay have banned future submissions from EZTV and put out warnings to users.