“Filelist.ro” Goes Offline After Romanian Authorities Seize the Domain

• One of Romania’s most popular private torrent trackers has been seized by the authorities.
• The admins were readying a migration to new domains but didn’t quite manage to do it. 
• The official explanation is a criminal investigation, but no one knows what is going on exactly.

A highly popular BitTorrent tracker “Filelist.ro” has had its domain seized by the Prosecutor’s Office of the High Court of Cassation and Justice in Romania, as there is an ongoing investigation that involves the website. As a result, the domain is now displaying a message from the law enforcement authorities, informing the visitors that the domain seizure is in accordance with the provisions of Article 249 of the criminal procedure code in Romania. What kind of crime has the website or its owners committed remains unknown at the time.

Filelist.ro has been around since 2007, so this was a highly successful BitTorrent tracker. Recently, the administrators announced plans to move the main domain to “Filelist.io,” stating that the authorities have started to consider tackling piracy in the country. They also assured their users that even if the police managed to seize their server, they had taken all of the required protection measures to secure visitors’ identities and IPs. They said everything is encrypted, so the anonymity of the platform’s users wouldn’t be jeopardized no matter what happened.

A few days ago, the main Filelist domain fell into the hands of the law authorities, so people used “Filelist.io” instead. Alternatively, there’s also the “flro.org,” which also seems to be online but not working as expected. The migration was actually going to happen a day after the seizure occurred, so things got tricky. Some users now fear that the alternative domains are controlled by the law enforcement authorities, acting as honeypots to lure uploaders and contributors to login and reveal their IP and location. As far as we can understand, this is most probably not the case with the other domains, but people would have to start looking for other trackers now anyway.

Users who claim to have received a message from the Filelist operators say that they don’t know what exactly has happened, no DMCA was ever received, and that the subject of the criminal investigation remains entirely unknown to them. We cannot confirm these statements as they have not been made via an official channel, and since the Romanian authorities haven’t published a clarifying statement either, speculation and rumors may continue to rage on for a little while longer.

Romania has been a country known for its leniency towards piracy, so we are not used to seeing offensive action against BitTorrent trackers based there. We will have to wait and see if this is part of a more extensive take-down campaign or just an isolated event that concerns crimes not relevant to copyright infringement and fraudulent advertising.