48 Raids Carried Out in File-Sharing Investigation

European police yesterday carried out raids across the continent as part of a file-sharing investigation. One of the addresses visited by police was the ISP linked to whisteblower website Wikileaks and file sharing site the Pirate Bay.

The AFP reports that European police yesterday raided 48 locations in 14 countries as part of a two-year investigation run by Belgian police. Of the 48 addresses, seven were located in Sweden and one was at ISP PRQ, which is home to servers used by the Pirate Bay and Wikileaks. However, Swedish police say the raid had nothing to do with Wikileaks.

TorrentFreak cites a PRQ representative who says five police showed up with questions relating to just two IP addresses.

"At 9:00 this morning, five policemen were here," PRQ’s Mikael Viberg explained to TF. "They were interested in who were using two IP addresses from 2009 and onwards. We have no records of our clients but we’re handing over the e-mail addresses for those behind the IPs. However, it’s rare that our clients have mail addresses that are traceable."

Four people are apparently being questioned on suspicion of breaching copyright law and servers and computers have been seized in Sweden. TF reports that the subject of the investigation is the Warez Scene, the network of sites at the top of the so-called 'Piracy Pyramid'.

A source later told the website that each raid was carried out in a similar fashion.

"In pretty much all of the cases the police just walked into the datacenters, proceeded with warrants, more or less unplugged the boxes and left with them," the person said. "They knew very well exactly what they were looking for and this was a highly coordinated attack."

Read more on Torrent Freak.