Bulgarian Police Arrest 1 over 4 Pirate Websites

The Unit for Combating Organized Crime in Bulgaria has arrested a 37-year-old man, alleged organizer of a crime group, distributing movies, music, software and books on four websites. Photo by BGNES

The Bulgarian Unit for Combating Organized Crime (GDBOP) has executed its biggest operation against Internet piracy so far.

Employees from the sector “Computer crimes and intellectual property” of GDBOP have stopped the Internet websites nanoset.net, rapidadd.com, 4storing.com, and afasta.com, which have illegally distributed movies, music, software and books.

The operation was executed Thursday in Sofia under the supervision of the deputy district prosecutor and with the permission of the district court.

The unit has worked for a few months on the case after receiving a signal by companies who had the copyrights to movies, music, software and books, distributed on the illegal websites.

The companies have claimed damages on Bulgarian and international authors.

The Prosecustion's Office has started pre-trial proceedings against the 37-year-old organizer.

During the operation, the police have established that the organized crime group has used complicated mechanisms for covering the location of the servers, which stored illegal content amounting to 200 000 CDs.

In order to access the information on the websites, the consumers had to send a text message, after which they received a code. According to preliminary information, the profit of the organized crime group amounts to more than BGN 5 M.

After the search, the police have seized 18 servers with hard discs of more than 120 TB. Two computer systems and documents connected to the organized crime group have also been seized.

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