French pirates adrift as major torrent site nuked by hacker who accuses it of hoarding user credit cards and DDoSing rivals: '6.6 million users. Years of lies. An empire built on extortion'

Bad news for French pirates*: major private torrent tracker YggTorrent was totalled earlier this month. The site, formerly among the biggest—if it wasn't the biggest—torrent tracking websites in France, was "emptied, then destroyed" by a hacker using the alias Gr0lum.

All of the following quotes were originally in French, and have been machine-translated. In a manifesto posted online in the wake of Ygg's seeming destruction, Gr0lum accused Ygg's owners of "DDoS attacks against competing trackers, purging uploaders the moment they opened their mouths, sabotaging your own API to prevent anyone from using third-party tools."

For those of you pretending not to know what a private tracker like Ygg is, the essence is that it's a site that indexes and makes searchable many of the innumerable (and usually illegal) peer-to-peer torrent downloads floating around the internet. They connect seeds (people who have the files) with leeches (people who want the files), but don't host the files in question themselves. A tracker being private means it cannot be used by unregistered users, who will sometimes have to pass some kind of interview to get in.

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Ygg was a major one. Originally launched in 2017, it grew to become a major presence in French-language piracy, and became a reliable source for users specifically searching for timely releases of French-language films, movies, magazines, books, games and so on. It stirred up controversy (via TorrentFreak) with the introduction of a €15-per-month "Turbo" subscription in 2025, without which it became harder to download files—another in Gr0lum's list of the site's sins.

Though a lot of French onlookers were glad, in communities like Reddit, to see Ygg get taken down a peg, more than a few expressed regret that the end of the site seemed to mean the end of its centralised repository of timely French torrents. The good(?) news for them is that, while Gr0lum destroyed Ygg, Ygg's torrents have already been scattered to various other trackers, some of whom have struggled to keep up with the influx of Ygg refugees. No, I don't think I'm allowed to link those sites. Je suis très désolé.

Gr0lum went on to make even more serious accusations: "You're storing all 54,776 of your members' credit cards? What exactly do you do with that information? What's the purpose of tracking each visitor's behavior? And the fingerprinting of crypto wallets—are your users aware of that?

"6.6 million users. Years of lies. An empire built on extortion."

Despite seeming down for the count, Ygg has returned—in the form of a countdown website—in the past few days, though it seems likely the damage is done. On that website is a statement: "individuals have been spreading numerous accusations accompanied by fabricated, manipulated, or out-of-context elements, as part of a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting YGGtorrent.

Among the claims being circulated:

• that our databases and backups were destroyed (false);
• that the site would be permanently offline and impossible to restore (false);
• that we collect users' banking information (false);
• that our security relies on obsolete mechanisms like MD5 (false, this hasn't been the case for a long time);
• as well as other equally unfounded accusations."

So far, the French piracy community doesn't seem won over.

*Bad news for the other kind of French pirates: there's just not the kind of money there used to be in ransacking the English merchant navy these days.