British Police Hijack Ads of 74 Pirate Sites

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TorrentFreak’s Freedom of Information request allowed the team to learn more interesting details about the British “piracy policeâ€, which appeared to be hijacking the adverts of 74 suspected pirate portals. The list of the domain names wasn’t disclosed, because this could “raise the profile of these websitesâ€. In order to avoid cyber-attacks, the names of participating advertising agencies were not disclosed either.

 

City of London Police have been cooperating with the entertainment industries for a while now, trying to tackle websites which provide unauthorized access to copyrighted material. The operation started by sending notifications to website owners, asking them to go legit or shut down, and moved on by targeting domain registrars, asking them to suspend the domain names of alleged infringers.

 

Now it is a partnership with online ad companies to replace advertisements on suspected pirate websites with police banners, which inform users that the service has been reported to the authorities. It turned out that 74 domain names in total are being targeted by the hijacking effort. All of them have been reported to the police by copyright owners, but the police wouldn’t reveal their names, because this could increase traffic to the sites in question.

 

It is also known that 83 advertising agencies are currently participating in the effort to target adverts on infringing portals. All of them are based in the United Kingdom or have a UK office, while many are multinationals with presence in the United States and elsewhere as well. The names of their advertising company partners weren’t disclosed either, because they could suffer from cyber-attacks.

 

There are more details on the other efforts of the “pirate policeâ€. For example, City of London Police has warned 107 online services since its launch back in 2013 and sent out suspension requests for 75 domain names. However, the domain name suspension efforts turned out to be not very effective, because only 5 of those 75 were granted. The rest were denied by domain registrars.

 

Industry experts are not sure whether the ad hijacking campaign will have much effect either. Thus far TorrentFreak has received no reports from users spotting these hijacked banners.