Battleangel

Here we go again. Details are still sketchy though.

Slyck - At approximately 10 AM, local police in a wide spread coordinated effort raided over 300 homes and offices associated with top warez providers. The raids took place in Germany, Austria, Holland, Poland and the Czech Republic. According to GVU (translated to German Federation Against Copyright Theft), over 30 individuals were arrested in the raids.

The raids also yielded over 20 servers, which provided FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access to individuals belonging to the release groups. GVU claims the warez groups were responsible for the proliferation “of illegal copies of films, computer games, music and user software.” The enforcement raids were the culmination of the GVU’s investigative efforts, with legal follow-through provided by the prosecutor’s offices in Duesseldorf and Frankfurt.

Rumors of the bust began circulating online today, as members attempted to warn each other. According to warning notices online, the following top providers have, for all intents and purposes, been eliminated; RELOADED, KNIGHTS, TFCiSO, Cinemaniacs, German-Friend, ParadieseBeach and Klapsmuehle. In addition, the leader of RELOADED was reported as arrested during the raids. The GVU confirmed the following release groups were eliminated; Unreality, DRAGON, Laboratory, Heaven, code talk, GTR, ECP, TRCD, AOS, MRM, SITH, GWL, Cine VCD, AHE, Cinemaniacs.

One German source claims that the GVU was targeted as well because they had employed scene informers and possibly by doing so incited the same infringement. Ring a bell? This was exactly the pseudo-legal Americanized measures taken by the equivalent Swedish organization last year. It’s no mystery who the real organized criminals are or from where they get their inspiration.