KickassTorrents

» see kat.cr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i used kickasstorrents from somewhere around 2010 until the day it went down in 2016. ttnet adsl by then was real broadband at home in ankara, fast enough to make torrents the default way to get a tv episode or an album that turkish stores did not carry. kickasstorrents was the index you typed when the pirate bay was throwing redirects or some carrier had blocked it. the layout was cleaner than the alternatives, the comments were actually useful, fake releases were flagged faster than on most other indexes.

the site launched in late 2008 under kickasstorrents.com. for the first few years it was one indexer among several, sitting behind the pirate bay and isohunt in any "top torrent sites" list at the time. in november 2014, after a long migration through domain seizures and ttnet-style country blocks, kickasstorrents passed the pirate bay in traffic and became the most-visited torrent index in the world. by 2016 it was serving over 50 million unique visitors a month and the us government later put the indictment number at about 12 million dollars in annual ad revenue.

the legal vulnerability was the same one megaupload had run into four years earlier. the indexer did not host the files. the indexer also pulled in ad money, took user uploads, and ran a curated paid-account system, which is what the us treated as a coordinated commercial enterprise rather than a passive search engine. by 2016 the us justice department had been pulling subpoenas from apple and facebook for almost two years, building an evidence chain that tied the operator to a single ukrainian individual.

~ the case file ~

~ the day it died ~

on 20 july 2016 the us doj announced the seizure of kat.cr. artem vaulin, 30, was arrested in poland the same day on a four-count complaint covering criminal copyright conspiracy and money laundering. the affidavit included a specific detail that became the most-quoted part of the story: investigators had matched an ip address vaulin used for an itunes transaction to an ip address used to log into kickasstorrents's facebook page. apple complied with the subpoena. that was the operational link.

the homepage was replaced with a doj seizure banner the same evening. mirror sites came up within hours, none of them the real database. former staff later relaunched at katcr.co with a similar look and a smaller index. that one stayed up through 2020 and then went dark with no public statement.

~ the long tail ~

vaulin was held in poland, released on bail in may 2017, and was still fighting extradition into 2020 when he reportedly violated his release conditions and disappeared. the polish proceedings were suspended. the us indictment is still open in 2026. nobody has been convicted in the case.

torrent traffic after july 2016 mostly redistributed back to the pirate bay (which had survived its own seizures and was on its nth domain by then) and to the surviving mirrors of kickasstorrents itself, which kept appearing under different tlds. none of them ever got back to the 50-million-visitor scale. by 2026 torrenting is a smaller category than streaming, smaller than direct cyberlocker links. the era when one site sat clearly at the top of the torrent index list ended on 20 july 2016 and never reset.

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