Swedish Anti Piracy Bureau Hails SVENNE Bust

About three days ago we reported about the quitting of Swedish scene group SVENNE (read it here if you haven’t). In their last NFO, SVENNE claimed to have made a deal with the Swedish Anti Piracy agency (Antipiratbyrån - APB) to avoid prosecution. While some doubted the accuracy of this claim, a news post on APB’s homepage seems to confirm what was said in SVENNE’s NFO. If what’s said on APB homepage is true, some SVENNE members who were busted had connections to veteran scene groups such as Razor1911, DRAMLiGHT, PUKKA, etc. Full news post is quoted below. Pay attention to the phrase in bold:

Sweden's leading warezgroups revealed

The Swedish Antipiracy Bureau has traced and identified the members of the releasegroups SVENNE and REDCROSS (previously SUBTiTLES). The groups have been the source of a large percentage of the illegal distribution of swedish, as well as forgein movies on the internet for the past ten years. Among the hundreds of movies that the group released are titles such as "Du levande" and "Onskan", and recently "Johan Falk - Vapenbröder" which the group released about two weeks before the DVD-premiere.

"It is a much welcomed and sought after announcement for me and many others in the movie business. The enormous damage that they have caused movie writers, actors, directors and other in Swedish movie industry cannot be repaired but hopefully this will lead to that creators can be better protected for this types of attacks in the future" says Joakim Hansson, writer and producer of among others Johan Falk movies.

The groups have announced their immediate cease of activitiy after the contact by the Antipiracy Bureau. The members were middleaged men and many of them working in the IT-industry. The leader of the group amongst other things were also the leader for the group NGR, but also a member of Razor1911, CLASSIC, ADHD, DAGGER, DMT and SWE6RUS, as well but not least DREAMLIGHT and PUKKA. Several of the members did also have connections to BBDVDR and a number of console-groups.
SVENNE and REDCROSS have been in a class of its own of the most organized and damaging Swedish releasegroups. Since the members have chosen to cooperate and provide us with valuable information the legal actions has not been taken, says Henrik Pontén.

Original version of this post may be found here.

Although it’s worrying to see some of the old school scene groups mentioned in the post, we don’t think any of those groups (other than SVENNE/REDCROSS) were hit hard. For example, Razor1911 pre’d Star_Wars_The_Clone_Wars_Republic_Heroes-Razor1911 only yesterday and there wasn’t even a mention of the bust in their NFO. In the meantime, APB has been celebrating as if they singled handedly brought the Swedish scene to a standstill – this however is far from the truth. If you log into a Swedish BitTorrent tracker, you’ll still see new releases (Swedish) being uploaded at a steady rate - not only those pre’d by scene groups but by P2P groups as well.

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