It turns out that a couple of purchases on iTunes helped to bring down the mastermind behind KickassTorrents, one of the most popular websites for illegal file sharing.
Apple and Facebook were among the companies that handed over data to the U.S. in its investigation of 30-year-old Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of the torrent directory service. Vaulin was arrested in Poland on Wednesday, and U.S. authorities seized seven of the site’s domains, all of which are now offline.
KickassTorrents was accused of enabling digital piracy for years, and investigators said it was the 69th most visited website on the entire Internet. It offered a list of torrent files for downloading bootleg movies, music, computer games and more, even as governments across the world tried to shut it down.
