Earlier this week Europe's warez scene was shaken up by multiple raids in Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, Great Britain and several other countries. In the reports that came out, dozens of news sources also linked some leading Bittorrent sites including The Pirate Bay and BTJunkie to the busts. Just to be absolutely clear, these sites were completely unaffected.

Earlier this week we reported that police in 14 countries around Europe raided dozens of servers that allegedly belong to Warez Scene topsites.

In a follow up article posted yesterday, we offered more information about the raids and their aftermath from Scene insiders, but still a lot of questions remained unanswered. Things got particularly confusing when leading torrent sites including The Pirate Bay and BTJunkie were linked to the police action in one or two news reports, a rumor which then spread virally around other media outlets.

Since the raids were targeted at Scene servers, computers where members have direct access to a variety of files in a closed system, torrent sites would be an unusual target to include. Still, when there’s news about a huge piracy raid – especially in Sweden – torrent sites are the things that naturally come to mind for a lot of people.

So, when the news broke about the raids while The Pirate Bay was temporarily and coincidentally offline a couple of days ago, several reporters added one and one. This is why dozens of sites reported yesterday that The Pirate Bay was taken down in the raids. Even when it reappeared, it was assumed that the site had relocated elsewhere. Other torrent sites including BTJunkie were mentioned as targets as well. Luckily for the site’s users, none of these sites were affected by the raid, nor were they targeted.

Although we never linked any torrent sites to the raids ourselves we felt the need to clear up the confusion. TorrentFreak contacted both The Pirate Bay and BTJunkie and we were assured that nothing was going on. BTJunkie’s founder told us that they didn’t even suffer the slightest downtime. The Pirate Bay team said that they were indeed down for a few hours, but this was because they had to upgrade the servers.

Hopefully this will put an end to some of the rumors that have been making the rounds in the last few days. There is little doubt that the police raids have had a serious impact on the Scene, but apart from seeing a minor decrease in Scene releases appearing online, BitTorrent sites are operating as usual.