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The alleged founder of one of the web's most popular file-sharing sites has been arrested in Poland following an operation by the US government to track down the operator of the site.

Ukrainian national Artem Vaulin has been charged with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, two counts of infringement and conspiracy to launder money. The US authorities are pushing to extradite Vaulin on the basis of him having made more than $1 billion of copyrighted material available online for free. US authorities say the site attracted around 50 million users each month.


While the authorities don't appear to have seized the primary domain (KAT.ch) yet - it's typically replaced with a notice saying it has been seized - the site is unresponsive and essentially down for most people. So is the server status page. Some sites in the network of mirrors appear to be working still though.

"In an effort to evade law enforcement, Vaulin allegedly relied on servers located in countries around the world and moved his domains due to repeated seizures and civil lawsuits. His arrest in Poland, however, demonstrates again that cybercriminals can run, but they cannot hide from justice," the assistant US Attorney General said in a statement.

Perhaps more than the arrest of Vaulin himself for allegedly running KickAss Torrents, what's likely to catch people's attention is the way in which authorities say they tracked him down.

According to the court complaint documents, investigators had a breakthrough when one posed as a potential advertiser on the site, and combined this information with data handed over by Apple that allegedly successfully cross-referenced an IP-address used for an iTunes transaction with another used to login to KAT's Facebook account.

The official complaint reads: "Records provided by Apple showed that tirm@me conducted an iTunes transaction using IP Address 109.86.226.203 on or about July 21, 2015."