I'm posting this under different account to not to link my old posts in this case.

Yesterday morning I was visited by a two police officers in my apartment.. they had search warrant and they took all my computers and other relevant stuff like cd/dvd roms and even my pda

They sortly told me what I was being accused of and showed me the search warrant. B*S*A had left some notice about me spreading copyrighted works via bittorrent and then police contacted my isp to get my name. Now they want me to pay retail price*10 of lots of different apps. And some of the fckers cost like 10k dollars

But it still gets worse, they reported me about spreading spyware too... I dont know how much I'm gonna be charged for that yet but it can be several thousands according to a lawyar.. I really hope theres no change to go to jail however.

SO but i have to go to court...

Do you guys have any helpful ideas or something that can help me in this situation? I barely made a few hundreds with pay per install, now i get this shit

if you spread retail software youre in some crap there ... this is the reason i never bind to software that is paid for... you could possibly play the "My computer was hacked and being used as a proxy by someone else to do dirty deeds" ... but it probably wont hold up...

I dont think the adware stuff will go through though...

If the police were involved, then it's probably criminal charges. If it was just a civil suit, find yourself a bankruptcy lawyer and file for Chapter 13 bankruptcy. This will protect you under the Bankruptcy Protection law. They won't be able to sue you after that, but your credit will be pretty much fucked for about 7 years.

Good luck.

american? I guess relakks would have been good to use, might have "saved" you

What exactly were you spreading? Ad0be products? What programs cost $10k?

This is exactly why I've been saying, if you are spreading torrent files you should be running peerguardian2 along side of it. It blocks all access to your computer from a blacklist of known Anti-p2p groups and all gov groups.

I got contacted about a year ago about downloading pride and prejudice from the Demonoid tracker, thankfully it was just a ceist and desist order and a warning from comcast. After that installed Peerguardian and never have had a problem since.

It's a little too late for ppiengineer sounds like charges may or may not be brought up on him, it probably will all depend on how many pieces of software he was sharing at the time, and how much of an example they want to set of him. Hopefully the judge will be lenient.

You have given me a new idea for my sig block now though hopefully to prevent this from happening again in our community.

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You guys should start a definitive thread about what precautions to take, to save noobs from such harsh outcomes.

Well I imagine it also depends on what your distributing in terms of software, BSA represents primarily large software companies, think Adobe, Microsoft, Corel, and others. If you distribute mainly pirated shareware, or apps from small shops, it probably would be alot safer, although you probably won't get as many installs either.
BTW, what about people with Linux-Based VPSes? Is there a Peerguardian type solution for those?

chck out moblock it could b what you are lookin for

Well, this is a real fucked up situation, but there's something fishy here, too.
Didn't you used proxys? How did the police got your IP, B#S#A did the research? I know it isn't impossible even if you used proxy, but it takes more than just ask ISP about your address. Did you spoked with some friend about what you're doing?. Because this really looks more like a set-up to me.

Spreading spyware? I'm not very sure about this but I thought PPI is legal addware, or at least some of them, so some of the accusations might not be correct.