News about large torrent sites being shut down is not uncommon. However you don’t often hear about smaller, private BitTorrent communities getting raided by the police. Such an unfortunate turn of events took place at Scene Base (SB), a private torrent tracker for General/0Day content. One of SB’s co-owner’s house was raided by the police yesterday and he was arrested on charges of copyright theft (info still not very clear). Both SB site and tracker have gone offline since the arrest. However for users of the tracker, there’s still hope; SB’s admins are determined to bring the site back online. Following notice is now posted on Scene Base homepage:

SceneBase

Site Down due to unforseen circumstances aka Police raid on my house

We will be back better and stronger but probably a different name we will be in contact with you all soon

In the mean time you can still chat with us etc on irc

irc://irc.scene-base.net

SB’s admins believe the arrest might not entirely be a ‘natural’ one. In other words they think that somebody set the owner up. Reason? Apparently some folks were not too happy with the good pre times SB was having on IRC tracer channels (note that these claims are unverified information).

Either way  good news is that the owner has been bailed for 4 days. In addition, SB’s coders are already working on bringing back the site on a new server (possibility under a new name too). If you were a fan of SB’s all you can do now is to wait patiently for the site to return. In the meantime we hope that legal issues will be sorted out soon and life returns to normal for all affected parties.

You may find a review of Scene Base here ( this is a very old review – SB’s has gone through a lot of changes since that was posted)


4 Comments

  1. Unknown // 11/13/2009 02:35:00 AM  

    So the site's admins decided to challenge the police and copyright holders while the owner is under arrest :-/
    All i see is this story just for site publicity and FN blog did the job for them.

  2. Anonymous // 11/13/2009 07:46:00 AM  

    However this happened, it doesn't look like he was protecting himself very well. If sceners could pwn him THAT easily, or if a small-time site owner such as himself could be randomly reached by authorities so easily, he mustn't have been doing a decent job at keeping himself anonymous.

    I doubt a site owner would make up a story about getting raided just to get attention to the site, 8787224. This publicity makes him look pretty idiotic. Wouldn't it likely drive some SB users away? Oh yeah, and maybe attract 10 brand new n00bs who are even n00bier than he is.

  3. Unknown // 11/13/2009 08:11:00 PM  

    It is hard to be completely anonymous.

    You need to pay server bills.
    Paypal will fax over your complete history and details if you fax a sheet of paper to them with "any" law logo on it.

    How do you pay for servers?
    How do you pay for topsite axx?
    How do you pay for anything else you need? Few people take cash :)

    If you do manage to pay anonymously. You need to hide your ip. Yes, easily done. But now you need a bnc for your irc.
    You need a separate race box, or vpn on your race box to trigger the races.

    If Scene the Base owners need a good IP lawyer that is familar with this type of stuff, they can contact me.

    yocto@storethe.net

  4. Unknown // 11/14/2009 01:14:00 AM  

    Quote:
    "How do you pay for servers?
    How do you pay for topsite axx?"

    You pay for servers through pre-paid credit cards bought from shops on the floor.

    You dont pay for axx, only noobz pay for axx.