Waffles.fm bans Romanian users

Update: It appears that Waffles.fm has now lifted the ban on Romania. Good news for our Romanian readers :)

Waffles.fm, one of the best private music torrents trackers, has banned all Romanian users from the site since the 23rd of December. The ban has not only affected potential new users but has resulted in existing Waffles members who are from Romania not being able to access the site as well.

Below is quoted from an update posted by a mod @ Waffles.fm:

Due to Romania being largely a cesspool of spam, viruses, phishing, and fraud, and phishing attempts, fraudulent donations, cheating, and the like from various Romanian IPs with zero action on the part of Romanian ISPs, Romania is hereby banned from Waffles. Please take care to not invite people if you know they're in or from Romania. We will not take action against you, but may change tune in the future.

Waffles is not the only tracker to ban Romania – several other high level trackers such as SCC have been blocking Romanian IP ranges for quite a while now. In almost all of these cases, the cause of the ban (as explained by tracker admins) has been above-the-norm number of cheaters being reported from Romania. Obviously this does not mean that every Romanian BitTorrent user is a cheater – it’s a prime example of how a handful of cheaters can ruin it for a number of good users who probably followed every tracker rule.

On the other hand, I can’t understand why anyone from Romania would want to cheat. As far as I know broadband connections in Romania are damn fast. Plus they have some of the best private trackers around such as iPlay, SceneFZ, CZONE (which AFAIK is an actual ISP), TorrentBits (Open) all of which have tons of Romanian users and still have great download speeds.

Tweet