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:
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
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)
